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UNITED STATES OF AMERICA. 



NEW CONCEPTS 



OF 



OLD DOGMAS 



NEW CONCEPTS 

OF 

OLD DOGMAS 



A BOOK OF SERMONS 



BY REV. JAS. E. ODLIN 



FLEMING H. REVELL COMPANY 
CHICAGO: I NEW YORK: 

148 AND 150 MADISON STREET 30 UNION SQUARE, EAST 

Publishers of Evangelical Literature. 



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Entered according to Act of Congress, in the year 1892, by 

FLEMING H. REVELL COMPANY, 

In the Office of the Librarian of Congress at Washington. 

All Rights Reserved. 



To 
MY WIFE, MY BEST FRIEND, 

This Book 

is 

Affectionately Dedicated. 

J. E. O. 



PREFACE. 



These sermons have been so kindly received 
by both the home congregation and strangers 
present, that the author has been encouraged to 
offer them to the larger public, with the hope 
that they may be found suggestive and helpful 
in the higher things of our common Christian 

h * PASTOR'S STUDY, 

First Presbyterian Church. 

Waukegan^ ///., Sept. io, 1892. 



CONTENTS. 



COSMOS AND WORLD-AGE. 

PAGE. 

I. The Creation Points to God. — Job 38 :ji ... 1 1 
II. Divinity vs. Humanity, or Aurelius vs. 

Christ. — Matt. 7 .• 12 21 

III. The Secular Spirit. — Matt. 6 : 10 34 

IV. God the Arbiter of Destiny. — Acts r ?*? 43 

THE USE OF MIRACLES. 

V. Christ the Miracle-worker. — Acts 2 : 22, 23. 53 
VI. Miracles as Related to Modern Life. — Acts 

ig : 11, /2 ' 66 

GRACE, LOVE, AND OBEDIENCE. 

VII. The Foreordained Grace of God. — Rom. 

8 : 29 79 

VIII. God is Love. — 1 John 4:8 89 

IX. Obedience Demanded. — Luke g .'62 99 

THE SON OF MAN. 

X. Carl Marr's Flagellants. — John 14 ; ij . . . 108 

XI. The Face of Christ. — 2 Cor. 4:6 119 

XII. The Stricken Christ. — Isa. 33 : 2 128 

THE SON OF GOD. 

XIII. The Appealing Christ. — Rev. 3 : 20 138 

XIV. The Meat which is Perishing. — John6:2j. 150 

[ix] 



Contents. 



CHARACTERISTICS OF EXPERIENCE. 

XV. The Patient doth Minister to Himself. — 

John 3 : 17 164 

XVI. LONESOMENESS FOR GOD. — Eph. 2 : 12 1 74 

XVII. Freedom of the Sons of God. — John 8 : 34. . 185 

XVIII. The Power of Habit. — Rom. 12 : 1 195 

XIX. Honest Self-denial. — 1 Peter 4 : 13 207 

XX. Ignorance in Moral Character. — Heb. 

4'i5 2I 9 

XXI. The Patience of Christ; May We be Par- 
takers. — Matt. 2j : 41 23 1 

THE PRAYERFUL TEMPER. 

XXII. The Basis of Prayer. — John 4 .'22 242 

XXIII. The Life Burden a Prayer. — Neh. 13 : 14. 253 

XXIV. A Valid Redemption. — John 3 : 14, ij 263 

IMMORTALITY. 

XXV. Yet shall I Live. — John 11 : 25 273 

XXVI. He is not Here; He is Risen. — Matt. 28 : 6. 283 



NEW CONCEPTS OF OLD 
DOGMAS. 

# * * 

THE CREATION POINTS TO GOD 

" Canst thou bind the cluster of the Pleiades •, or 
loose the bands of Orion P" — yob jS:ji. 

THE nations about ancient Israel worshiped 
the heavenly bodies. To them they were 
the divine powers or etherial bodies of 
the genii, and worshiped as such. On the 
other hand, the Scriptures always maintain 
the creature-hood of all the starry host. 
This would exclude their deification ; hence 
they are regarded as light-bearers, — His 
ministers a flame of fire, — the subservers 
of mundane purposes. That they illustrate 
by their greatness and the splendor of their 
natures, the divine majesty and wisdom, is 
the teaching of the text. The Psalmist finds 
proof of God's true love to man in the vast 
concerns of a universe proclaimed at night by 
the glowing splendors of their glittering orbs, 



12 Xitvo Concepts of £)16 Dogmas. 

looking out upon the seething darkness 
brooding over the abysmal gulf of time. 
There was an age when men did not under- 
stand very much of anything save the little 
strip of earth their own nation inhabited, and 
such other country as they had covered in 
their travels. The highest form of philoso- 
phy and knowledge was engrossed by the 
man himself and the organized governments 
under which he lived. He had sculpture, 
architecture, wealth, slaves. Gold and silver 
were his money and his ornament. Bronze 
was his weapon and utensil ; war and its 
divertisement the employment and pleasure 
of his existence. Such a man worshiped as 
gods the protector of the streams about him> 
of the vale in which his village-city stood, or 
the ever-present miracle of the sun by day 
and the moon by night. The ancient the- 
istic belief of the Jew taught or was cogni- 
zant of a world creation and sustentation, 
through the Lord, the giver of life, — an 
apprehension strictly in keeping with the 
scientific spirit of our century. The heavens 
by day, the moon and stars by night, were 
before all men. Here was the real mystery 
of existence laid bare, if rightly understood. 
Conscious there was no adequate solution 



0?e Creation points to (Sob. 13 

of the mystery of the stars by night, aside 
from God as first cause, the writer's hand 
is pointing to the mystery of the chaos 
which fills all the heavenly spaces, whether 
glowing for us in the radiance of the sun, or 
shrouded in the veiled face of mother earth 
withdrawn from the blaze of celestial glories. 
Assured that men cannot explain away the 
facts of universal nature, though they might 
smirch their own birthright in proving them- 
selves earth-born, he turns his eyes to the 
ever-present object lesson writ all over the 
material things which man handles and 
knows, concerning the omnipotence of the 
over-soul and the all-wise nature of the 
superhuman Intelligence which holds flam- 
beauant torches over the bottomless gulfs of 
the stellar places, from which, listening, we 
may hear " the roaring loom of time." 

The tendency of this age, we may call it 
the world spirit, is to magnify the miracle of 
life. We live ; the animals live ; the plants 
and trees live. This wonderful benefac- 
tion over which man has dominion, fills his 
senses, absorbs his nature, and blinds his 
intellect until, as Bunyan so well portrays, 
he may be all absorbed in what his muck- 
rake shall fetch him of glittering gold, the 



14 Hem Concepts of Ulb Dogmas. 

substance of the world's wealth, from refuse 
and ashes. But the stars are above him, and 
he can see them, the glittering jewels of a 
dead creation. Far out as his eye can reach 
there is nothing but death ; illimitable waves 
of light and sound are coursing through the 
transparent ether, a great ocean bearing ma- 
jestically upon its bosom at least five stellar 
systems moving, like our earth and its 
planets, around a common center. Man is 
supreme in his domain of life. 

Elihu had closed his harangue of distrust 
with the words : " Touching the Almighty, we 
cannot find Him out ; He is excellent in 
power and in judgment, and plenteous justice. 
He will not afflict. Men do therefore fear 
Him : He regardeth not any that are wise of 
heart." To which God makes answer out of 
the whirlwind, showing that, judging by His 
handiwork, men must admit His wisdom as 
seen in all the creation. The argument is 
simply a great piling of one upon another, an 
Ossa upon Pelion, that the majestic nature of 
the Deity may be seen in a great heap of His 
works. In the midst of this discourse He draws 
an argument from the heavens. " Canst thou 
bind the cluster of the Pleiades, or loose the 
bands of Orion ? Canst thou lead forth the 



Cfye Creation points to <0o&. 15 

signs of the Zodiac in their season ? or canst 
thou guide Arcturus with her train?" 

Look up now to the heavens and see the six 
bright stars of the Pleiades, or seven, if your 
eyes are gifted ; named after the seven daugh- 
ters of Atlas and Pleione, who, pursued by 
the hunter Orion and beseeching divine pro- 
tection, were translated to the stars ; one of 
whom fable says is invisible for shame be- 
cause, goddess-born, she loved a mortal man. 
But there are more than seven ; some eyes can 
see eleven. There are six to average eyes ; 
while viewed through " the optic glass of the 
Tuscan artist," they are multiplied tenfold. 
These stars have ever held human interest. 
In the ancient astrology they/brought stormy 
weather. Job elsewhere speaks, however, of 
their good omens ; while Milton, taking up 
the same thought, sings of how, leading forth 
the sun at the creation of the solar system, 

" The gray 
Dawn and the Pleiades before Him danced, 
Shedding sweet influence." 

What does the Psalmist mean by " binding 
the cluster of the Pleiades or loosing the bands 
of Orion" ? Was it not an inspired testimony 
as to the motion of these stars in their orbits, 
which never can be fettered by man ? And 



16 Hem Concepts of £)16 Dogmas. 

those bands of Orion ; what are they belted 
across but the famous nebulae of that con- 
stellation of which Herschell says, " I know 
not how to describe it better than by com- 
paring it to a curdling liquid, or a surface 
strewed over with flocks of wool, or to the 
breaking up of a mackerel sky when the 
clouds of which it consists begin to assume 
a cirrous appearance " ? One of those three 
stars in Orion's belt is white, and another 
red. Now white stars " represent the early 
adult and most persistent stage of stellar life ; 
. . . while ... in the red stars we see the 
setting in and advance of old age ; midway 
between which is our solar system in the 
period of full maturity and commencing age ; 
the third star is nebulous, and all the stars 
of Orion are seen against that nebulae, the 
fiery mist or shining fluid out of which the 
heavens and earth [have] been slowly fash- 
ioned." 

Belted Orion, then, is constant witness of 
God's might, every night giving fitting dem- 
onstration of God's formative work in the 
creation of the worlds, described rudely in 
Genesis, but going on before our eyes in 
spectrum analysis. You will notice there- 
fore a wonderful correspondence between 



€f>e Creation points to (Sob. 17 

the latest science and God's book in the 
first chapter. 

" When I consider the moon and the stars, 
which Thou hast ordained." Who is it that 
thus considers ? Why, it is a man looking 
out into the heavens, and he can see 2000 
stars, but the telescope brings millions within 
range. The argument is therefore many times 
stronger to-day than it was in the time of the 
Psalmist. But light is now dissected by the 
spectroscope after it has traveled nearly 200 
years from Arcturus. Indeed, Arcturus may 
have disappeared a hundred years ago, and 
we not have found it out yet. But we are 
catching proofs of what it was, and estab- 
lishing forever its component parts. And as 
to the signs of the Zodiac, they were simply 
marks upon the map of the heavens, render- 
ing the name and place of each intelligible ; 
but since it is possible, by the dry gelatine 
plates of photography, which are exposed 
for hours, to gather up impressions through 
light-energy of the faintest objects, it has be- 
come feasible to photograph the very stars in 
their courses, and to record light-waves too 
small and too large to excite vision in the 
human eye. This enlarged capacity ena- 
bles a photography of the heavens, which 



18 ttett) Concepts of 2)16 Dogmas, 

began with Draper's picture of Orion in 
1880, and which, dividing the work among 
eighteen observatories, arranges to make a 
great photographic chart of stars in the 
heavens to the 14th magnitude, to consist 
of 11,000 views each 4 square. 

There are stellar systems several times the 
size of the solar system, hurtling toward us 
at wonderful velocities. There are quiet 
nebulae, or very nearly so, as if they were 
sentinels on the border land at the ends of 
the immensities. There are dark worlds 
rolling along in the darkness like unperceived 
meteors before they reach the confines of 
the earth's atmosphere ; and the collisions 
of these dark suns, not provided against by 
Omnipotence, is perchance the source of the 
nebulous stars through which is accomplished 
the more or less complete rejuvenescence of 
the old, old world. This, with the interplay 
of electricity in far-off worlds, destructive and 
luminous, may well make the dust-formed 
son of man stand awestruck, as he considers 
the stars which God has ordained. 

Canst thou, O man ! lead forth this vast 
precession ? In all that modern science has 
done for you, has it given you power over 
the celestial spaces ? Has it done aught for 



Cfye Creation Points to (Sob* 19 

you, save to reveal in most appalling way 
the feebleness of man's nature in the lap of 
God ? Is not the sentence of the Psalmist 
full of soul-stirring solemnity in view of the 
growth of the heavens as they have been un- 
folded to the mind of man? "When I con- 
sider the heavens, the work of Thy fingers, 
the moon and the stars, which Thou hast 
ordained ; what is man, that Thou art mindful 
of him, or the son of man, that Thou visit- 
est him ? " 

" The brighter stars cluster into well-known 
groups upon a background formed of an en- 
lacement of streams and convoluted windings 
and intertwined spirals of fainter stars, which 
becomes richer and more intricate in the ir- 
regularly rifted zone of the Milky Way. We 
who form a part of the emblazonry, can only 
see the design distorted and confused ; here 
crowded, there scattered, at another place 
superposed. . . . Can we suppose that each 
luminous point has no relation to the others 
near it than the accidental neighborship of 
grains of sand upon the shore, or of particles 
of the wind-blown dust of the desert ? Surely 
every star, from Sirius and Vega down to 
each grain of the light-dust of the Milky Way, 
has its present place in the heavenly pattern 



20 Tizw Concepts of £>lb Dogmas. 

from the slow evolving of its past." l In other 
words, to this profound student, astronomical 
knowledge all points to God, the first cause 
and maintainer of the stellar universe. 



1 From address before British Association by its presi- 
dent, Dr. W. Huggins, Aug. 19, 1 891. 



AURELIUS VS. CHRIST. 

" All things therefore whatsoever ye would that 
men should do unto you, even so do ye also 
unto them: for this is the law and the 
prophets." — Matt. *j: 12. 

I TAKE the golden rule as my text, because 
I desire to consider a great Roman charac- 
ter, who was a teacher of moral power, whose 
works have been translated into modern 
languages, and who is venerated by many 
thinking men in our day. I desire to set 
over against his best teaching the word of 
Jesus, and try to show how different it is in 
reach and power, and how much above it 
looms the majestic nature of the teachings 
of the New Testament. 

"Our little systems have their day, 
They have their day and cease to be ; 
They are but broken lights of Thee, 
And Thou, O Lord, art more than they." 

It will naturally occur to you to ask 
whether there is any trace of the golden rule 
in the writings of Aurelius. I can say there 
are passages which show in a degree the 
same spirit. Let me quote : " Adapt thy- 

(21) 



22 ttem Concepts of Vlb Dogmas. 

self to the . . . men among whom thou 
hast received thy portion, love them, but 
do it truly." "Just as it is with the mem- 
bers in those bodies which are united in one, 
so it is with rational beings which exist 
separate, for they have been constituted for 
one co-operation;" or as Paul says, "All 
members have not the same office." 

Again, Aurelius says, " The best way of 
avenging thyself is not to become like the 
wrong-doer." Not so high a standard, all will 
admit, as, " If thy enemy hunger, feed him ; 
if he thirst, give him drink ; for in so doing 
thou shalt heap coals of fire on his head." 
He says elsewhere : " Shall any man hate 
me ? Let him look to it. But I will be mild 
and benevolent to every man, and ready to 
show even him his mistakes." 

His view is within ; he has large apprecia- 
tion of the contents of the human heart. His 
philosophy of life from that standpoint is 
Epicurean, that is, strive to be happy, and he 
magnifies the Stoic life to this end. Hence, 
he can give such a sentence as this : " If 
thou findest in human life anything better 
than justice, truth, temperance, fortitude, 
and, in a word, anything better than thy own 
mind's self-satisfaction, . . . turn to it with all 



Jlurettus vs. Christ 23 

thy soul, and enjoy that which thou hast found 
to be the best." " The mind which is freed 
from passions is a citadel ; for man has noth- 
ing more secure to which he can fly for ref- 
uge, and for the future be inexpugnable." In 
this he is at one, it seems to the preacher, 
with the Nazarene : " Keep thy heart with 
all diligence, for out of it are the issues of 
life." 

According to the Stoic philosophy all 
things change, there being a true conserva- 
tion of energy. This man was the forerun- 
ner of the modern materialistic school, and 
had their thought of atoms and the physical 
organization of things as far as was possible 
in the state of scientific knowledge. But in 
this transitoriness, " Keep thyself calm," is 
his maxim, and do thy duty, living according 
to the nature of things in a God-made world, 
and according to reason. ''Whatever any 
one does or says, I must be good ; " just as if 
the gold, or the emerald, or the purple were 
always saying, " Whatever any one does or 
says, I must be emerald, and keep my color." 
" Be like the promontory, against which the 
waves continually break, but it stands firm 
and tames the fury of the water around it." 
"Be cheerful also and seek not external help 



24 Hetp Concepts of £)15 Dogmas. 

nor the tranquillity which others give.'* A 
man, then, must stand erect, not be kept 
erect by others. Christ has a similar thought 
concerning constancy: " He that putteth his 
hand to the plow, and looketh back, is not 
fit for the kingdom of God." 

This man is no Puritan ; he teaches that 
sin in others should be unnoticed. All the 
area of his combat is within. He elsewhere 
teaches a philanthropy for others, but he no- 
where teaches that we should strive to make 
men better. He says, "Look not around, 
at the depraved morals of others, but run 
straight along the line without deviating from 
it." " How many pleasures have been en- 
joyed by robbers, patricides, tyrants." He 
would not have us like them ; he would 
teach us to despise those motives that rule 
them, and hence despise pleasure. This man 
could not have been the disciple of Him who 
twice cleared the temple courts of money 
changers and them that sold doves, using in 
His strong right arm a whip of small cords, 
and whose admonition has ever since made 
the second thought of discipleship, — so to 
live that men may see your good works, and 
glorify your Father who is in heaven. To 
him the soul is a citadel having the misfort- 



2turelius vs. Christ 25 

une to be loaded down with a body whose 
infirmities it must bear with as little notice 
as possible. "Thou art a little soul, bearing 
about a corpse." (Ep't\) " Consider thyself to 
be dead ; . . . and live according to nature the 
remainder which is allowed thee." He would 
treat all pain as the American Indian bore 
indignities, wounds, and death at the hands 
of his enemies ; so, too, all fame and honor ; 
so, too, all the luxuries of wealth. The body 
he loathed ; the spirit he crowned. Christ 
might have taught him, " Those things which 
proceed out of the mouth come forth from 
the heart ; and they defile the man." The 
Stoic needed to know that the body and the 
things thereof were no defilement only as 
perverted ; that the noble office of religion 
is to rule and save the whole man, rendering 
unto God the things that are God's. 

Not only do men die, but they are also to 
be forgotten ; hence this teacher would have 
us magnify the present, as being all there is 
for the individual. " Thou art satisfied with 
the amount of substance which has been 
assigned thee, so be content with the time." 
"Near is thy forgetfulness of all things ; and 
near the forgetfulness of thee by all." " Short- 
lived are both the praiser and the praised, 



26 Xitw Concepts of 2)16 Dogmas* 

and the rememberer and the remembered ; 
and all this in a nook of this part of the 
world." " I am the resurrection and the life," 
said our Lord ; " he that believeth in me, 
though he were dead, yet shall he live." Yet 
Aurelius believed that the reason why Chris- 
tians feared death no more than he, was 
because they were obstinate and dramatic. 

Marcus Aurelius had no fear of death, and 
yet he appeals to the transitoriness of exist- 
ence, bidding us do every act of our " life as 
if it were the last ; " but the sobering thought 
is, that it is the last, and death ends all. 
Hear him speak for himself: " Everything 
is only for a day, both that which remembers 
and that which is remembered." " Death is 
a cessation of the impressions through the 
senses, and of the pulling of the strings which 
move the appetites and of the discursive move- 
ments of the thoughts, and of the service to 
the flesh." " Do not act as if thou wert 
going to live ten thousand years. Death 
hangs over thee. While thou livest, while it 
is in thy power, be good." " And to say all 
in a word, everything which belongs to the 
body is a stream, and what belongs to the 
soul is a dream and vapor, and life is a war- 
fare and a stranger's sojourn, and after fame 



2tureltus vs. Christ 27 

is oblivion." This reminds one of Wesley's 
hymn, which at least is Christianly in- 
spired : — 

" Our life is a dream, 
Our time as a stream 
Glides swiftly away, 
And the fugitive moment refuses to stay," 

and which ends with the stanzas, — 

" O that each in the day 

Of His coming might say, 
* 1 have fought my way through, 

I have finished the work Thou didst give 
me to do.' 

44 O that each from his Lord 

May receive the glad word, 
* Well and faithfully done, 

Enter into My joy, and sit down on My 
throne.'" 

Nothing can better illlustrate the dif- 
erence between this noble heathen's teach- 
ing, — drawn from the certainty of this 
life, and the sole opportunity given a hu- 
man being for doing good, so that he should 
long to do good for the simple sake of 
the good he can do, apart from all rewards 
and punishments in the world to come, — and 
Christianity, which sets before us the same 
argument under the idea of this life as a pro- 



28 Jxett) Concepts of £)lb Dogmas. 

bation, and besides fills the present moment 
with the eternal consequences of the life to 
come. Do good now, says the Christian 
teacher, for the night cometh, when no man 
can work. 

But while lacking the impressive argument 
of the fixity of character, this Stoic emperor 
gives profound witness of the power of con- 
science. He often speaks of it as the dcemon 
within, sometimes calling it the deity, some- 
times the divine part. This holy presence 
he venerates. " Reverence of the dcemon con- 
sists in keeping it pure from passion and 
thoughtlessness," " preserving it tranquil, fol- 
lowing it obediently as a god, neither saying 
anything contrary to the truth, nor doing 
anything contrary to justice." 

The second distinguishing feature of practi- 
cal Stoicism is its doctrine of contentment. 
The apostle says, " Godliness with content- 
ment is great gain." The contentment of 
Aurelius is very wide ; it is the satisfaction of 
the soul with the law of nature. He teaches 
that " in anger the soul does violence to itself; 
hence anger is sin." The Lord Jesus said : 
"Love your enemies, bless them that curse 
you, pray for them who despitefully use you 
and persecute you." Again, Aurelius taught 



2tureltus vs. Christ 29 

the soul does violence to itself when it is over- 
powered by pleasure or pain. Jesus taught, 
"Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with 
all thy heart, mind, and strength." Aurelius 
taught that the soul does violence to itself 
when it says anything insincerely or untruly. 
The Lord Jesus said, " Blessed are the pure in 
heart, for they shall see God." Aurelius 
taught also that the soul does violence to itself 
when it does anything carelessly or without 
aim. Jesus said, " But let your communica- 
tion be Yea, yea ; Nay, nay : for whatso- 
ever is more than these cometh of evil." 
And finally, Aurelius taught man's duty to 
the state, while Jesus of Nazareth said, 
" Render unto Caesar the things that are 
Caesar's." In other words, to Aurelius vexa- 
tion is sin, whether to a man or to his con- 
science. Hence the person should hold 
himself calm against every sort of pleasure, 
pain, praise, anger, pride, and ease, and 
against injustice and untruth. 

This shows us the length of his tether; 
or, if you please, the lack and the resources 
of a man without the Bible. While there is 
a kind of working morality here, there is 
small consciousness of sin, and yet enough so 
that he can say : " Never value anything as 



30 Item Concepts of £>lb Dogmas. 

profitable to thyself which shall compel thee 
to break thy promise, to lose thy self-respect, 
to hate any man, to suspect, to curse, to act 
the hypocrite, to desire anything that needs 
walls and curtains." He also understands 
the course and power of temptation, speak- 
ing of which he says : " All these things, 
even though they may seem to adapt them- 
selves to the. better things in a small degree, 
obtain the superiority all at once and carry 
us away." Toward the gods he was reverent, 
but they were the sun and perchance other 
planets, component parts of the universe. 
He really believed, like Emerson, Fic'hte, 
and Hegel, that God is revealed in the world, 
it being a revelation of himself, and that 
thus conceived God is the world, and the 
world is God. Hence he could say con- 
stantly, " Regard the universe as one living 
being, having substance and one soul ; and 
observe how all things have reference to one 
perception, the perception of this one living 
being ; and how all things act with one move- 
ment ; and how all things are the co-operating 
causes of all things which exist; "and also, 
"I venerate, and I am firm, and I trust in 
Him who governs," or "what else than to 
venerate the gods and bless them ? " 



2turelius vs. Christ 31 

Two considerations remain to me in clos- 
ing. This same noble Marcus Aurelius was 
one of the persecuting heathen emperors. 
We are told that under him the persecu- 
tions took a fresh turn ; he gave full scope 
to the outbursts of popular fury, and intro- 
duced espionage and tortures, that Chris- 
tians might be led to recant. Now this was 
a man who advocated toleration among the 
heathen, but who could not tolerate Christ. 
The most horrible persecutions occurred un- 
der his auspices. To mention the most fa- 
mous instance : Blandina, a delicate female 
slave, was scourged, roasted on a red-hot chair, 
thrown to the wild beasts, and then executed. 
The dead bodies of the martyrs lay in heaps 
on the streets at Vienne. John Stuart Mill 
calls it "one of the most tragical events, in 
all history," and Mill ought to know. The 
emperor seems to have been angered by the 
enthusiasm with which the Christians met 
death. The cold moralist put to death the 
enthusiast for holiness. It is claimed that 
Aurelius never read a line of the New Testa- 
ment ; if true, it is so much against his repu- 
tation, for he was deluged with Christian 
apologies, and as emperor had no right to 
condemn unheard any set of opinions. 



32 Hem Concepts of 2)16 Dogmas. 

Here was a man possessed of the scientific 
spirit and a moral character of great worth, a 
man whom the modern agnostic quotes. I do 
not dig him out of his grave to do despite to 
his memory, but I do rather exult to think 
how narrow is the sneer against the fanatical 
spirit of the church, when he whom they 
could crown as the consummation of their 
ideal in most ancient times, showed the per- 
secuting spirit with most terrible ferocity 
against the same Christianity which the 
modern Pantheist hates. Secondly, this man 
was extolled by John Stuart Mill as a writer 
in his " Meditations" of an ethical elevation 
almost equal to that of the Sermon on the 
Mount. I am willing to grant the helpfulness 
of that book to a man who does his duty ; it 
is an ethical hand-book of value to me per- 
sonally. I admit its help. But it is no more 
to be compared with the ethical teachings of 
Christ than a speck of dust in a ray of sun- 
light athwart a darkened room is to be com- 
pared to the blazing glory of the noon-day 
sun. It is a little revelation made to the 
natural heart through the Holy Ghost. This 
man thus eulogized by Mill was made a god 
in Rome when he died, in 180 A. D. Mill 
nearly succeeded, in his own imagination ; 



2lureltus vs. Christ 33 

the ancients succeeded quite, and placed 
his bust in the atrium of their houses among 
the Penates. There is no comfort in anything 
Marcus Aurelius can say apart from Jesus 
Christ. There is stimulus in him, but there 
is no inspiration of life. We take him as our 
friend ; we take Christ as our Redeemer, and 
rejoice that we have a greater light than 
this great genius of the past. 



THE SECULAR SPIRIT. 

" Thy kingdom come." — Matt. 6:10. 

THERE is a pomp of earth distinctively as- 
sociated with human life. When we rear 
the magnificent bronze to perpetuate the 
characteristic appearance of some celebrated 
person, long lines of veteran organizations, 
loud volleys of artillery, and all the impressive 
ceremonial it is possible to devise, mark its 
completion and devotion to its great and 
beautiful aim, which is to perpetuate among 
men the memory of the golden words that 
fell from those lips, and of the unique in- 
fluence of that marked personality upon the 
community life of its age. 

In a certain sense a life is the product of 
the environment. It is one thing to be born 
on Lake Michigan at latitude 43 , and quite 
another to be born at Stanley Pool on the 
Congo. What career is worked out on either 
continent is in a measure distinctive thereof. 
The savage chief in the heart of Africa holds 
his position in a kind of representative capac- 
ity ; a reverence attaches thereto sufficient 
(34) 



Cf?e Secular Spirit 35 

to transmit his autocratic power to his de- 
scendants. The world age of his time finds in 
him its most splendid representative, and 
would surely claim him as its own. Very 
much the same way in our land, the distin- 
guished man is claimed to have the marks of 
the commonalty about him ; he is first of all 
the product of their schools, their religion, 
their culture, and their civilization. 

The same glorification of the world period 
is traceable in art. Each splendid effort of 
genius illustrates more fully human experi- 
ence, and unfolds more widely the truth of 
man's likeness to his Maker. True, most of 
the classic names of painters have been those 
distinguished in their treatment of religious 
subjects, and many critics propose to find in 
their works evidence of profound spiritual ex- 
perience. Correggio, Titian, Carracci, Do- 
menichino, Guido Reni, Michael Angelo, are 
all church Christians of a pronounced type. 
In music we may similarly call the list of 
great names, and we shall find many a one 
whose distinction rests upon work more or 
less directly religious. Handel could not be 
Handel without the " Messiah, " any more than 
Raphael could be Raphael without the Ma- 
donnas. But these representatives serve as 



36 ttetp Concepts of Vlb Dogmas. 

the basis of the canons of modern art in 
their sphere, just as the mutilated Greek 
sculpture in its sphere, not withstanding 
the influence of time in mutilation, is su- 
preme as the standard of taste. 

This individual state of the human mind 
is so advanced beyond the acquirement 
of its fellows, that men call it inspired, the 
powers of imagination and color are so 
superhuman, and its achievement is so un- 
approached in its generation. The great 
statesman, we say, has genius ; the great 
scholar has gifts ; the poet and the artist 
have inspiration. When they are living, 
the glory of the canvas, the faultless lines 
of the statue, the imposing and beautiful 
effect of the public edifice, the dominant 
effects of human intellectual greatness, show 
forth a glory of this world, a something in 
creation apart from God, independent of 
nature, and characteristic of humanity ; this 
I do not condemn. It must speak to the 
devout soul of the wonderfulness of the 
human heart in its capacities and endow- 
ment, and of the heavenly begetting of the 
human soul : — 

" The soul that rises with us, our life's star, 
Hath had elsewhere its setting, 
And cometh from afar." 



Cfye Secular Spirit 37 

It is, however, possible to regard the 
works of man independently from the motive, 
the moment, and the environment. We 
have the glorious resultant left clear and 
well-discerned to mortal eyes. But here the 
world spirit shuts itself to this contemplation 
of the achievements of the ages, and we see 
men give themselves to earnest study of the 
biography of heroes, who do not devote one 
moment of the years to thoughts of God or 
higher thought of duty. Then comes a 
deification of human intellect and a constant 
laudation of the gigantic works from men's 
hands. The world age is now in a condition 
to appeal to men's sympathies and to se- 
duce their wills through the aesthetic and 
finer senses ; they have not God in all their 
thoughts. Some such apprehension of 
earthly glory may have colored the pure 
vision of- the Son of God when, for purposes 
of human redemption, Satan tempted Him 
and unfolded to Him the kingdoms of the 
world in all their glory. The highest re- 
wards of intellectual greatness, namely, 
that consciousness of superiority, which, 
however slight, pampers the weak vanity of 
small souls, and which in all its fullness great 
souls are not insensible to, and that added 
sense of world consciousness in which the 



38 Xievo Concepts of £)I6 Dogmas. 

world vaunts itself as free from God and 
transcending Him, that fullness of life and be- 
ing when God is esteemed afar off and ex- 
istence per se is assumed, was the prize which 
Satan offered, and which the Son of God, 
though tempted sorely, put aside. Milton, in 
" Paradise Lost," describes such a world 
consciousness : — 

11 High on a throne of royal state, which far 
Outshone the wealth of Ormus and of Ind\ 
Or where the gorgeous East with richest hand 
Show 'rs on her kings barbaric pearl and gold, 
Satan exalted sat, by merit raised 
To that bad eminence. ... 

And by success untaught 
His proud imaginations thus displayed. 
Powers and Dominions, Deities of heav 'n, 
For since no deep within her gulf can hold 
Immortal vigor, though oppressed and fallen, 
I give not heav'n for lost : from this descent 
Celestial virtues rising will appear 
More glorious and more dread." 

The world consciousness of hell is after all 
the world consciousness of earth which exalts 
itself against God. The deification of dead 
heroes among the savage tribes of Africa, the 
worship of ancestors in China, the deifica- 
tion of both ancestors and heroes in ancient 



Cf?e Secular Spirit 39 

Greece and Rome, — all testify how the world 
spirit under different conditions lifts its head 
against the kingdom of God. In those coun- 
tries where the low degree of civilization has 
precluded the elevation of the world spirit to 
a more exalted form and culture, it remains 
where it was centuries ago, and we may study 
it in its native seats to-day, and learn some- 
thing of the darkness of the human imagina- 
tion as it exalts itself against the Supreme. 
But in those nations that reach a higher 
level of intellectual life we find a more per- 
fect apprehension of the glory of this world 
and a greater exaltation of human achieve- 
ment. Lysander, returning to Sparta after 
the overthrow of Athens, was sung by the 
poets and worshiped as a heathen god. Al- 
exander the Great became so intoxicated 
with the full measure of the glory of the 
world which he enjoyed, that he insisted 
upon the reverence of a deity from his court- 
iers and generals. So much has history left 
us of the culmination of the esteem of Greek 
genius for itself and its age. But in Rome, 
where the human intellect under the blessing 
of God attained its most magnificent propor- 
tions, we find Caesar voted by the senate, — 
after the campaign in Africa, which firmly 



40 Hem Concepts of £>lb Dogmas. 

established him on the throne, — a statue 
with the inscription, " Caesar the demi-god," 
temples erected to his " clemency," where 
his worship was celebrated, and his image 
borne with those of other gods at festivals 
and laid with theirs on the altar. When by 
the senate Caesar was formally declared a 
god, the emperor then ruling, Augustus, was 
declared by courtiers to be inspired by the 
Deity, and in remoter parts of the Roman 
empire, temples were rising to his divinity. 
And I have only tithed them ; sixty human 
beings were deified by the Roman state, from 
Caesar to Constantine. And worst of all was 
Nero, who by his terrible cruelties, animal 
sensuousness, demoniacal debaucheries, and 
inhuman persecutions, earned the appella- 
tion of antichrist, the wild beast from the 
abyss, and was the representative to the early 
church of the great red dragon, — this man 
was called on coins " the Saviour of the 
world," greeted by crowds as a god, sacri- 
ficed to on altars in the streets along which 
he walked, and declared by the poets a deity 
of the first rank. But modern examples are 
not wanting. In 1792, during the Jacobin 
revolution which declared atheism the true 
religion and indiscriminate murder the hand- 



Cfye Secular Spirit 41 

maiden of liberty, the commune of Paris, at 
a festival in the ancient church of Notre 
Dame, enthroned a shameless prostitute as 
the " Goddess of Reason." And last of all, 
we cannot fail to notice that essential deifi- 
cation of the celebrated philosopher, Auguste 
Comte, by the philosophical sect which he 
founded. 

I have striven to give thus some impres- 
sion of the external nature of the kingdom of 
darkness, to show its reality, and that it has 
a history on earth. I appeal to the memory 
of your hearts, if in hours of temptation you 
have not been conscious of the glamour which 
attaches to the things of earth, as over against 
the kingdom of God and His righteousness ? 
And what is this kingdom of our heavenly 
Father, which we are to pray shall be estab- 
lished ? I ask you to notice its lowliness and 
difference in mission. Is there pomp and 
ceremony in it, a prescribed ritual, a robed 
clergy, and gothic house filled with a dim re- 
ligious light through glass of beautiful color 
that speaks the master-hand of the artist ? 
and does the swelling music through the dim 
aisles seem the seraphic voice of heavenly 
song by angel choirs ? Then know that 
though faith may live along with this min- 



42 Turn Concepts of £)16 Dogmas* 

istry to the aesthetic feelings, there is not 
of necessity one particle of faith in it such 
as shall make the worshipers true members 
of the kingdom of God. Does earthly king- 
ship covet the title of defender of the faith ? 
Though that sovereign may be a precious 
Christian queen, who graces the nobility of 
her blood by the purity of her Christian life, 
know that the power that wields the scepter 
and the sword is not able to make a single 
soul righteous, or blot out the iniquity of a 
single transgression. Does the human in- 
tellect vaunt itself over its achievements ? 
Know that, unaided of the Holy Ghost, it 
can never fathom the depths of its own sin. 
But the first note of its creed is death to the 
soul filled with the worldly spirit : " Lord, I 
repent; do thou forgive;" and every subse- 
quent step of that life is a shaping of heart 
in its innermost passions into the likeness of 
Him who set all the temptations of earth at 
naught, and took upon himself the death of 
a vile criminal at the hands of brutal sol- 
diery, amid the plaudits of a Jewish mob, in 
order that the glory of another might be 
made manifest, even the glory of the eternal 
Father. 



GOD THE ARBITER OF DESTINY. 

" He said unto them, It is not yours to know 
the times or seasons, which the Father hath 
kept in His own power." — Acts i : J. 

SOME students have seen a rebuke in this 
answer of Christ. And indeed it may be 
a rebuke, though just its exact meaning is 
hard to define. Granted He does mean to 
reprove them, strangely telling commentary 
this upon their slowness to believe and per- 
versity to receive of Him who spake as never 
man spake, that in this last interview before 
the ascension, Christ was compelled to give a 
stinging blow of censure, reminding them 
that they were under His tutelage, and that 
it was His duty as teacher to instruct them in 
what it was fitting they should know, rather 
than in what they desired to learn. " Surely 
He scorneth the scorners ; but He giveth 
grace unto the lowly " (Prov. 3 : 34). 

You will remember that back in Christ's 
ministry, on Wednesday before Passion 
Week, just fifty days previous to our text, — 
for now He is standing on the brow of the 
Mount of Olives and is soon to be caught up 

(43) 



44 Hem Concepts of £)lb Dogmas, 

into heaven, — there had been similar ques- 
tioning on the part of the disciples concern- 
ing His second coming, then on the Mount of 
Olives as now, only then overlooking the 
Temple, prophecy concerning the throwing 
down of whose stones led up to the question, 
privately asked by a few, " Tell us when shall 
these things be." In the first instance His 
second coming and the end of the world is 
had in view ; in the second, the restoration of 
the kingdom to Israel, both in my opinion 
being the same event under different titles. 
Pray notice the answer in each case. In the 
former, " Of that day or that hour knoweth no 
one, not even the angels in heaven, neither 
the Son, but the Father ; " in the latter the 
words of our text, "It is not yours to know 
the times or seasons which the Father hath 
kept in His own power." It seems to the 
preacher there is a progress of knowledge in- 
dicated here. In the first instance, Christ 
declares His ignorance as a bar to revelation, 
in the second He pleads lack of jurisdiction, 
which the Father hath and the Father alone. 
In the first it is, " I know not ; " in the second 
it is, " I can not." But He leaves us with this 
declaration of a divine providence running 
through the times and the seasons of this 



(Sob tfye Arbiter of Destiny* 45 

little planet we call the globe as next to the 
last words that He should ever utter to the 
twelve men whom He had chosen to be wit- 
nesses of His life and sufferings, and preachers 
of His gospel. 

The time and place make it an awe-inspir- 
ing theme. The dogma of our text is 
profound. Its time and circumstance give 
suitable setting that the gleam of the jewel 
may be seen in its worth, the truth of which in 
its concept may well engross our attention. 
Epochs and incidents of history are in God's 
power. Mahomet and his epoch, Rome and 
her epoch, Napoleon and his epoch, are all of 
God, and do not go beyond His permissive 
decrees. In Christ's thought all is under His 
power. " Roll up that map," said Pitt, after 
the battle of Austerlitz, as he lay a-dying, 
" it will not be wanted this ten years." That 
was man's estimate of the situation in 1806. 
Waterloo and St. Helena were God's answer 
in 18 1 5. To every cry of human despair 
there is God's answer in destiny, which He 
hath kept in His own power. Knox preached 
congregations into fury against sacerdotalism, 
so that though he said not a word instigating 
to violence, they left him on one or two occa- 
sions to demolish monasteries, shatter altars, 



46 Hem Concepts of £)lb Dogmas. 

rend pictures and vestments ; yet God guided 
the molten metal of that reformation period 
into such mould that Scotland became most 
law-abiding. 

Day before yesterday anarchists were fight- 
ing troops and police all day long in Rome 
and Lyons. In European countries the agi- 
tations of the past have been within a gen- 
eration against church and monarchy ; the 
unrest of to-day proclaims the dissatisfaction 
of laborers with all governments. The Old 
World has more of the dissatisfied, but she 
has also a larger population per square acre. 
Out of this chaos shall come a result, one of 
the long series of time, and its consequent 
eventualities which God has appointed by His 
own free will. Be not therefore restive at 
the seeming progress of this or that danger- 
ous opinion, either in church or state. If 
God would destroy the church by progress 
of opinion, nothing can save her ; if He would 
destroy the ship of state, nothing can keep 
her from the rocks. We can do but little in 
this world to make it better, much less turn 
the tide of public opinion ; but God rules, 
and is bringing His own designs to pass on 
earth as well as in heaven ; statesmen are 
but pawns upon the chess-board of the world ; 
He moveth them as He will. All times are 



<go& tfye Arbiter of Destiny* 47 

in His hand ; they shall not flinch. All his- 
tory is therefore but God's working with hu- 
manity, as geology is His working upon the 
material universe, and as chemistry and 
botany are kaleidoscopic views of God's 
handiwork in present events. 

There was an ancient theory that each 
cycle of history is but a reproduction of the 
one just past. The preacher would not 
waste breath disputing it, but he would call 
your attention to this : that according to 
Jesus Christ, God is the one absolutely un- 
changeable condition of human history, the 
source of its unity, the arbiter of its destiny. 
He, therefore, is the best historian who reads 
best God's teaching in the book of life. He 
who reads only man's works, touches only 
circumstantials of the handiwork of the Un- 
seen. This history of the world, a never-end- 
ing panorama, is the history with which the 
religious concerns of mankind are to be 
identified. The gospel was not to be the 
sum and substance of all things, in the sense 
that having reached its development, earth 
had come to heavenly fruitage, and the globe 
must needs cease turning on its axis. But 
instead the gospel of Christ is subordinate 
to the providence of God the Father. 

One might foresee from this statement of 



48 Hen) Concepts of 2)16 Dogmas, 

our Lord's the failure of the great Roman 
Church to make the pontiff of even her vast 
communion the head of national governments. 
Certainly as Protestants we think that it is 
in keeping with the modern idea that all 
the relations between government and church 
should be those of tolerant protection. We 
can understand how it was that the Scotch 
and English Puritans had a work to do in 
this country with their lofty ideals of duty, 
along with the Dutch who came to trade 
in peltries, and the Maryland Catholics who 
came for toleration. All were merged in the 
epoch ; each one played his part well under 
God. Fully as we may be convinced that 
one had a nobler mission than others, yet 
we are conscious that the best each could 
offer was used by Him who ruleth the times 
and seasons, and hath kept all within His 
own control from the foundation of the world. 
We can understand how it is that piety and 
the world often clasp hands on many great 
subjects, as when the immoral, vain, head- 
long, foolish humanist, Ulrich von Hutten, 
united with the pure, lion-like Luther and 
the courageous, rational Zwingli, also good 
and pure, — it was camp-follower, monk, and 
pastor, — against Rome and her mastery over 



(gob ttje Arbiter of Destiny* 49 

human life and conscience ; or as when Theo- 
dore Parker, Ossowatomie Brown, and William 
Lloyd Garrison, — Rationalist, Calvinist, and 
infidel, — unitedly fought slavery intrenched 
in high places and condoned by the sleeping 
conscience of a free people. In the East, 
where there are laws prohibiting the liquor 
traffic, it is no uncommon thing for all de- 
nominations, liberal and orthodox, to unite 
with atheist neighbors, not even-handedly, 
but unite nevertheless to suppress open sale, 
all agreed that this thing is of the devil and 
no good. 

We serve Christ, and the output of our life 
is merged in humanity ; we and they are one. 
We are Christian in heart ; we are human in 
species. Our obligation is to God ; our life is 
with men. Duty must be met at the bar of 
a human conscience in the presence of an 
omniscient God ; service must be rendered 
on the theater we call human life. There is 
no obscuration of the Father's jurisdiction by 
reason of the incarnation, for Christ took 
upon himself the form of man. We can un- 
derstand that readily, but further, Christ ad- 
mits that His mission does not affect God's 
headship over human nature and all its af- 
fairs. There was a cross on Calvary which 
4 



50 XCzvo Concepts of Vlb Dogmas. 

had a bleeding sacrifice for you and me, mak- 
ing an atonement, alike of wondrous pathos 
and inestimable dignity, the efficiency of 
which is our sole hope of redemption. But 
that sacrifice left undone many things which 
may be called the wheel of natural life. It 
released us from the power of death, but it 
did not abolish the death of the body or the 
pains of disease. Every weakness of the 
flesh is full to overflowing. The cup of hu- 
manity's tears is wrung full, morning, noon, 
and night ; the freshness of the morning is 
breathed on brows hot with fever, and 
parched throats are thirsting interminably 
for cool water that goes babbling by from 
springs as old as the hills. 

Our Christian life may give such admirable 
Stoicism under pain, that we may bear up 
better, — plain living and high thinking may 
save us many aches and pains ; but the body 
must suffer ; for the times and seasons are 
within the authority of the Father. Life is 
lengthened a third or half under the civili- 
zation brought to pass by the teachings of 
Jesus ; and our lives are so happy, and the 
boon of existence is so sweet, that we bless 
God for every additional hour. It is a thing 
to be prayed for and, if won, joyfully ac- 



(gob tfye Arbiter of Destiny 51 

cepted. But the amount of pain necessary 
to close our lives is, so far as we know, a con- 
stant factor. There are the losses by death. 
You who are older know best what this 
means. But toward men outside our families 
we also have compassions. It is like a line 
in battle, one falls on the right and one on 
the left. They were Christians, but the times 
and seasons are in God's hands. They drop 
out so frequently, we begin to say, " Why 
am I left ? This man was healthy and more 
needed than I." There is an adage, " The 
good die young." However much hearts may 
bleed, there is the consolation of a divine 
purpose shrouded in the mystery of being, 
which purpose must be benevolent, for God 
is good. 

According to Christ, the great purposes of 
revealed religion must wait upon God's provi- 
dence. That providence ushered us into be- 
ing, and keeps us here. It shall lead us 
forth again, let us hope, to a nobler life prom- 
ised through faith. We do not realize the 
awfulness of every tick of the watch, which 
measures God's will of time and sense for us. 
Perhaps it is well we do not. As God is su- 
preme, he is a good object of faith. I am 
weak and helpless under Thy chastisements, 



52 Hem Concepts of £>15 Dogmas* 

faulty and fickle in my best judgments, a 
creature of day dreams shot here and there 
with the bright colors of illusive hopes and 
debasing prosperity. O God ! dear God ! 
who keepest times and seasons within Thine 
own power, my heart and my flesh crieth out 
for the living God. O Christ ! Saviour of 
sinners, may Thy intercession and sacrifice 
avail that my spirit fail not of strength be- 
fore the appointed time of deliverance comes, 
when the Father hath determined that I 
must die. 



CHRIST THE MIRACLE WORKER. 

u yesus of Nazareth, a man approved of God 
unto you by mighty works and wonders and 
signs, . . . ye by the hand of lawless men 
did crucify and slay " — Acts 2 : 22, 23. 

THE Apostle argues that Christ was ap- 
proved of God because He wrought won- 
ders. Strange, is it not, that which was 
an argument in the first century should be- 
come a hindrance and stumbling-block in the 
nineteenth, and that the emphasis of religion 
should have changed poles from stress upon 
the supernatural to insistence upon the eth- 
ical ? They said Christ wrought wonders. 
We say Christ wrought righteousness. But 
yet the ethics of the first church super- 
abounded ; the reason why Christianity con- 
quered the world was that Christianity was 
able to prove to the world that it had better 
morals than that world. Miracles, then, were 
not ever the sum of Christian faith ; they 
were simply decoys to arouse the attention ; 
not meant as the real proofs, only first proofs 
to awaken the understanding, that the abso- 
lute demonstration to mind and heart might 

(S3) 



54 Hem Concepts of £)lb Dogmas* 

follow. May they not be like irons driven 
into the crevices of the precipice, by which 
one may mount, of no further service, the 
cliff once passed, but never to be displaced, 
as there always must be some climbers-up 
that way. So it happens we in this nine- 
teenth century are still clinging to the 
miraculous in religion. 

Most religious philosophers are wont to 
call attention to the fact that Christianity 
shares this peculiarity with all other great 
religions. We must note, however, that by 
reason of its written memorials of her past, 
Christianity hath from the first had an 
accurate knowledge of her history denied 
to other beliefs. It does not affect the 
truth of Christian miracles which were re- 
ceived by devout minds and handed down 
soon in written documents that other faiths 
have had miracle myths. The growth of 
myth in the New Testament must have taken 
place, the scholars tells us, before 65 A. D., 
the date of the first Gospel (Mark), and were 
quoted by church Fathers within the first 
century after Christ's death. We have no 
right to throw away the miracles of our Book 
because of the growth of mock m iraclesin 
theirs. We have, however, a right to throw 



Christ tfye miracle tDorfer, 55 

them away when scholarship is able to prove 
that any one of them did not occur. 

I have always held that the miraculous side 
of the Bible was in large part due to contact 
with superstitiously wrought faith and to the 
credulity of the populace among which it was 
first preached. The adherents of other faiths 
would deny its credibility were these lacking, 
and would be enabled to shake the fidelity 
of many of its members. I adduce this as 
something always to be taken into account, 
rather than as something novel. 

Christ wrought a revelation in an ancient 
faith and national life. That people were re- 
ligious and patriotic in an eminent degree ; 
they were learned too, and acute ; they had 
a wonderful literature in their sacred books, 
a wonderful conception of the Divine Being, a 
wonderful solidarity in their social life, which 
had come to fixity in social manners and 
customs. Here comes a man without pres- 
tige, from the family of a village artisan, of 
royal blood indeed by remote descent of a 
throne usurped, but no more so than hun- 
dreds, yea, thousands, of others who had 
come into the lengthened antennae of the 
royal genealogical tree. He loosens the 
power of caste upon multitudes, leading 



56 ttetp Concepts of £>Ib Dogmas. 

them, soon after his death, to break with 
nation, religion, and party, and become 
known only as his. Alive, he split the peo- 
ple in twain again and again ; dead, he per- 
manently divides the national life. They 
had been bound to creed and nation ; they 
were henceforth bound to him. Moses had 
been their pride ; Christ was become their 
glory. They had heretofore lived for them- 
selves ; they now lived unto Him only. 
Moreover, the contagion spread. 

Rome, who had conquered Judea and held 
it with firmness in her iron grasp, notwith- 
standing its remoteness on the frontiers of 
the empire, herself in turn was conquered by 
a Jew, and in spite of the persecution of 
emperors, the corruptions of the time, the 
contempt of wealth, the resistance of heathen 
learning and philosophy, and the satire and 
sneers of the populace, within three cent- 
uries, representing the whole of the known 
civilized world, was transformed and trans- 
muted to new views, new righteousness, new 
forms and social laws ; that is, from polythe- 
istic heathenism, with its lords many, to the 
refined speculations of Christianity founded 
upon its doctrines of a triune Godhead ; from 
the idea of a state to be plundered, to that of 



Christ tfye TTiivack tDorfer. 57 

organic society, as an integral part of the 
kingdom of God. I said it changed its cus- 
toms ; so it did. Its feasts became Christian ; 
the Christian festivals replacing those as- 
signed to each part of the year, all in a similar 
way being transformed and diverted, divested 
of old ideas, re-invested with new. Sunday 
was introduced, and its observance enforced 
by law. Time was dated from Christ's death, 
whereas before it had been computed from 
the foundation of the Roman city. The tides 
of vice were rolled back ; the pontiff had the 
power of an emperor ; the priest that of a 
prince. Qualify it as you may, a stupendous 
miracle has been delineated by the church in 
history, and cannot be effaced. We will not 
follow it down through the ages. Its life is a 
perpetual reality, adjusted to each age, but 
born of the heart and mind of God. 

Now was there no reason behind this stu- 
pendous fact ? As well say there is no beach 
below the tide, no sun behind the light of 
day. Significance of all this is not chiefly, 
but yet it is significantly, in the beginning. 
Could the mighty impetus which divided 
Judaism and converted Rome have been 
founded on a fiction ? As well say the story 
of how Bonaparte conquered Europe and 



58 Hem Concepts of £>lb Dogmas. 

placed his creatures on many a throne, was 
a mistake, that he had no power to lead 
legions into battle, no wizard-like strategy, 
no magnetism upon men. As well say there 
has been no tariff legislation in America, and 
no theory of national development on this 
continent, as to say that the miracles of the 
first ages of the history of the church are not 
traceable to actual and powerful miracles, ac- 
companying the life, death, and resurrection 
of the Lord Jesus Christ. Without miracles 
it is a mirage to be dissipated by scrutiny of 
the time in which they appear. But the age 
in which they appeared, believed. The Jew- 
ish rulers did not believe ; the Christ was 
crucified ; His disciples scattered, — why did 
they believe, except for signs and wonders 
such as convinced their reason, in spite of all 
unbelief and cavil, that the Jewish rulers 
and mob were wrong, and this Jesus whom 
they crucified was both Lord and Christ ? If 
miracles were not in the Book, we could not 
understand how faith came into being, and 
the church began her life. The rise of the 
church is due to a conviction of men, aroused 
by the miracles of the Christ. Before His 
goodness they stood rebuked ; before His 
miracles they bowed. His righteousness ap- 



Christ tfye VTixxacU VOovhv. 59 

palled them ; His miracles convinced them ; 
as in life, so after death. 

Though this pulpit cannot see how the in- 
tegrity of Christian things can exist without 
miracles, it does not follow that miracles are 
to be viewed in precisely the same light as 
of old, when they were wrought. To them 
every silent act out of the ordinary course 
was instinct with God. To-day the Chris- 
tian thinker sees God here, but studies His 
work to see how He works. He has been 
trained to this in his investigation of or- 
dinary nature. As to-day nothing happens 
above law or beside law, and contradictions 
are formal and not real, the sudden comet 
being as much under law as the finest grain 
of seashore sand on the hard beach of the 
ocean, so owing to our scientific education 
we look upon the strange as a new aspect 
of the formal, and another expression of the 
output of God in law. It is not wrong, there- 
fore, to frame theories as to scientific relation 
of Christ to the wonders wrought, that we 
may say how He did it. It is not necessary 
for the validity of the miracle that we stand 
awestruck, as did the early disciples, dumbly 
unconscious of anything save awed amaze- 
ment. That it fitted its time is thus made 



60 Hern Concepts of Vlb Dogmas* 

most obvious. To you and me it means 
hardly more than many a wonder done in 
the natural world, such, for instance, as the 
persistence of every flower after its kind, so 
that it is three or five parted, according to 
its plan, is green or red, and has similarly 
veined and shaped sepal, petal, or involucre, 
and sends out leaf stems in precisely the 
same way. The real wonder is the conjunc- 
tion of all the events of His time with the 
vicissitudes of the God-man's personality. 

The great Napoleon was wont, at the crit- 
ical moment of battle, watch in hand, to await 
the booming of Soult's, Ney's, or Grouchy's 
cannon, knowing that if they met the ap- 
pointment, his strategy had met fruition. As 
this act of Bonaparte showed a master-mind, 
so God's timing of all things, making the 
wonders of the life of Christ focus in the per- 
son of Christ, shows mastery of destiny. 
Any one of these acts might have happened 
alone, and been dismissed as either prodigy 
or law work ; but concentrated into the life- 
time of the Eternal Son, following attentive 
upon His acts and obeying the word of His 
life, we have a most startling correlation of 
motive in God with revelation to men upon 
earth. This I claim to be the heart and life 



Christ tfye ZTttracle tDorfer. 61 

of the wonders of Christ's ministry, and is no 
destruction of the miraculous. The scientific 
spirit is therefore revealing the full nature of 
miracle, and by making it understood, is per- 
forming the same service to the miraculous 
in the Gospels which it is doing in unravel- 
ing the knotted threads of natural law, and 
showing that there is no labyrinth in nature 
but what has its clue, which, taken, leads out 
at the very gates of the palace of God. 

For instance, the mind-reader of to-day, in 
catching involuntary movements of the eye, 
hand, and other parts of the body, is making 
plain along what line Christ's superhuman 
endowment lay when He read the thoughts of 
men. If there is a natural hypnotic control 
of one mind by another (?) by which nervous 
disease may be relieved by gifted men, we 
know that a slight increase of similar powers 
would explain the processes of many New 
Testament miracles. When men of strong 
bodies and capable of great physical endur- 
ance in our own time, begroomed and be 
watered, fast forty days and more, the forty- 
days-and-nights fast of our Lord bespeaks 
more of the intensity of His struggle against 
sin, who is the holy Saviour of His people, 
than of angelic ministries ; when the con- 



62 XtetD Concepts of £)lb Dogmas, 

test ended, the eternal Son had established 
forever the chastity of His spirit. Since sur- 
geons in rare cases find patients in the hos- 
pitals sweating blood drops in the extremity 
of the anguish of a human spirit under pain, 
we can better appreciate the depths of the 
human nature of our Lord by means of the 
acuteness of His shrinking from the foreseen 
suffering, and the fullness of His heroic nature 
that flinched not through it all. 

These are illustrations of what I mean by 
the illuminating character of modern scien- 
tific research upon miraculous things in the 
New Testament. It does not destroy the 
miraculous, it rather makes it alive. For 
the old idea of miracle is dead to you and 
me, except as we view it through modern 
eyes, and explain the wonderful phenomena 
presented. I also notice that miracles are 
still wrought, and it does not occur to the 
preacher why the old miracle should be dis- 
credited and the new believed. The ship 
whose prow is stove-in by the iceberg 
on the great banks of Newfoundland, is 
providentially saved ; a few feet farther, and 
the air-tight compartment had not availed. 
A gentleman steps off a train to view a coal- 
mine, and is withdrawn from the railroad 



Cfyrtst tfye IHtracle tDorfer. 63 

accident ensuing, — providentially diverted, 
we say. Stambouloff and Beltcheff were 
walking home, from a cabinet council, near a 
public square in Sofia. In the dusk the as- 
sassin pours the contents of his revolver 
against Beltcheff, thinking he was the lion- 
hearted premier of Bulgaria. God's destiny, 
we say, preserved the protector of the liber- 
ties of the new-born Danubian state. The 
Duke of Westminster devoted the earnings 
of the celebrated Ormonde to the erection of 
a beautiful church near Eton Hall, perhaps 
signifying by this act that God disposed the 
chances on the turf in his favor ; just as 
at ancient Lyons the Romans put upon 
a tavern door recently discovered, " Here 
Mercury promises you gain, Apollo health, 
and Septumanus good fare and a good bed." 
If, then, the most trivial accidents of our 
time are to be accounted as dropped out 
from God's hand by His will, so that even we 
may pray for His blessing as we gamble, — 
the preacher very much doubts whether there 
is not a time when every gambler prays, — 
then who are we that we deny God's power 
to bring to pass a series of such providential 
dispensations, some of adversity, others of 
prosperity, but all of which together in this 



64 Hem Concepts of £)lb Dogmas. 

life of the Nazarene as in your life and mine 
make up that total of what we are and what 
we hope to be, giving Him distinguishment 
among the sons of men as a wonder worker, 
having power with God ? 

I have called attention to the fact that 
apostolic preaching made acceptance of the 
miraculous the first step of conviction. I 
want to add further the thought that they 
who accepted miracles believed and were 
saved. Somebody every now and then takes 
me into a corner and says, " I do not be- 
lieve this or that miracle. I cannot feel 
it is true. I accept the Bible, all but this." 
Now the preacher is one of those persons 
who perceives clearly that belief in God and 
love for man is the main thing, but belief in 
God and love for man with consciousness of 
salvation have ever gone hand in hand with 
belief in the miraculous. Of old, men denied, 
turned their back upon Christ, and died in 
their sins ; to-day, as ever, men deny mira- 
cles, turn their back upon Christ, and die in 
their sins. Of old, men believed and were 
saved ; to-day men believe and are saved. 
But says some one, " It is hard to believe." 
You are mistaken. The hardest and most 
injurious thing in modern intellectual life is 



Christ tfye VUxvacU VOothv. 65 

to deny on simple assumption anything as- 
serted in God's book. For one miracle is 
nothing more or less, if you prove it false. 
But all miracles are thrown when you relin- 
quish one simply because " I am a mind to." 
I am talking of God's blessing the heart and 
mind of a man through faith, and I say, if 
you want peace, " Believe, and thou shalt 
be saved." 



MIRACLES AS RELATED TO MOD- 
ERN LIFE. 

" And God wrought special miracles by the 
hands of Paul: insomuch that unto the sick 
were cai'ried away from his body handker- 
chiefs or aprons, and the diseases departed 
from them, and the evil spirits went out." — 
Acts iq : n, 12. 

HANDKERCHIEFS and napkins which 
had come in contact with Paul's body, 
were borne away, and the sick were healed. 
Now a fair treatment of this narrative de- 
mands that we shall accept it as it is. We 
would like to believe there was a volition of 
Paul, but he may not have been conscious 
that the cloths were taken. Christ, you will 
remember, had the hem of His garment 
touched by the woman in the crowd, and 
turned, conscious that power had gone forth 
from Him. Still, of the millions that touched 
the Son of man, only one of them all was 
healed ; one was in such state that virtue 
went forth at the touch of faith. In this in- 
stance alone in the life of Paul is there 
similar unconsciousness of the endowed per- 
(66) 



ZTCtraeles as Helateb to ZtTo&ern £tfe. 67 

sonality concerning the fullness of his mi- 
raculous gifts. Once in the history of Peter 
the sick were placed where his shadow 
might fall. 

These few instances were given, per- 
chance, that we could not rationalize them 
away. We are reducing miracles to the 
minimum, explaining them by natural law, 
finding in them a higher law, not seeing in 
them God's will regnant, and forgetful of a 
divine personality which can break through 
the ordinary restraints of natural law as 
easily as an elephant can brush aside the 
rabbit-snares boys set in the jungles ; and as 
commonly does it, as men by intuition and 
experience enter into their birthright of 
power and dominion over nature, and tear 
natural law in pieces. For instance, there 
are beautiful trees growing in a fertile, well- 
watered soil ; dale and hill are an oasis of 
beauty, so superlative are they of their kind ; 
when the rosy dawn lights the skies, God's 
heavens seem to kiss them, as in the morning 
mothers kiss children half awakened from 
their slumbers. But man finds in the bowels 
of the earth the yellow glitter of the pre- 
cious copper ; he digs for it ; he builds his 
furnaces that forth from their livid lips of 



ti8 Hem Concepts of £)Ib Dogmas* 

flame he may take their liquid treasure, " pu- 
rified seven times as by fire." That dross 
which was there by law of nature he has 
purged, and it is gone, — behold a miracle, — 
and the gases which he has generated in sepa- 
rating the metal from its dross, have been 
a quiet pestilence for miles in area, to flower 
and shrub and tree ; the principle of life in 
seed and flower, in grass and shrub, is gone. 
The decaying tree-trunks of the monarchs of 
the forest are plaintive witnesses of the de- 
struction which man has wrought when he has 
laid his hand on natural law, and by the 
powers bestowed upon him hath brought the 
desolations of the desert upon a blooming 
garden of God. 

Now the question is, whether man shall 
thus be a bull in the china shop of nature, 
destroying objects, and rending law in tat- 
ters, while God is tied hand and foot in the 
world which He has made ? and shall we stand 
aghast when we see evidence of that same 
interference with natural law by God with 
which on the part of man we are so familiar ? 
— a familiarity that has bred contempt and 
which has in its turn blinded itself in stupid 
egotism to the matchless power of God. But 
I will state it again. 



ZUtracles as Helateb to ZHobern £tfe* 69 

Here is a midget of a man, so puny that 
he might well fear lest the Deity, chang- 
ing the grapple of the belted crust enswathing 
mother earth, might topple off a crag and 
bury him under a thousand tons of crystal- 
lized quartz ; he disports himself picking up 
a stone pulled to the earth by centrifugal 
powers, and forgetful that he lifts it by an 
interference with natural law. Moreover, this 
man breathes, unmindful that his lung cavity 
is saved from being crushed in and he him- 
self made a revolting spectacle, solely by di- 
vine interposition, through which in some 
way men are enabled to overcome the pull 
of these same centrifugal forces, and to live 
in spite of dominant law. We sometimes 
wonder how flies stick on ceilings ; I fancy 
there is greater wonder how men live. And 
this is the creature who cannot believe that 
the Almighty can invade, in the personali- 
ties of Jesus and His disciples, the domain 
of natural law, whose whole life is a con- 
stant series of invasions of that same sort. 

It is evident God intended that there 
should be no doubt as to miracles. For 
wriggle around one and another as you may, 
you will be but impaled on the third. Hyp- 
notism may explain one thing, but it cannot 



70 Heu> Concepts of £)R> Dogmas. 

explain all. Christ was more than a mind 
reader ; His revelation more than that of 
Madame Blavatsky, and His miracles more 
than those of Col. Olcott, Blavatsky 's lieu- 
tenant, who has been working modern signs 
and wonders of late in Ceylon ; thus putting 
new wine into the old wine skins of Bud- 
dhism in the East. Of the type of admittedly 
unimpeachable miracles contained in the 
Gospels is this miracle of Paul's handker- 
chiefs. Tradition says they were carried 
into Bulgaria, and that there the miracles 
were wrought, but that is a long way. All 
the teaching I can see is that to some 
sick folk unable to be on the scene of 
the Apostle's labors, healing was carried 
by faith through articles which had been 
touched by Paul. Christ always did some- 
thing ; He would say, Son or daughter, 
I say unto thee, Arise ; He would pray be- 
fore raising the dead to life ; He would 
moisten the spittle and place it upon the 
blind eyes to be made seeing, because He 
was working miracles upon men, and work- 
ing manifestly and clearly apart from natu- 
ral law, which He was to defy. We should 
be more and more in the dark if He had not 
dramatically done these things. Dramatic, I 



VflxvacUs as Helateb to ZHobern £ife. 71 

say, in order that men might be attracted to 
the act, and with aroused attention witness 
His deed ; they would therefore perceive there 
was no fraud or jugglery about it, and also 
have most clear consciousness that it was 
from the resources of His own personality 
these works were wrought. 

You say, " There is no need of miracles ; 
it amounts to nothing in my faith. Why do 
you puzzle with these arguments of analogy ? 
Why does the church insist on the super- 
natural works of Christ, and subject Chris- 
tianity to the suspicion of being charlatan 
born, like Mormonism, spiritualism, and the- 
osophy ? " Well, here is a man with hypnotic 
powers such that he can control the will of 
another, remove the disorders of his halluci- 
nations, heal his nervous sickness, and make 
him testify that the healer is a most marvel- 
ous personality, gifted with divine powers. 
Said Madame Blavatsky to Moncure D. 
Conway of the things her disciples said 
concerning her, " They think they see 
them " ( ?). The power of the hypnotist, from 
a disciple's standpoint, would seem super- 
natural. What argument could you and I 
advance to these admirers and devotees if 
the miracles of Christ were wanting? We 



72 Xizw Concepts of £)lb Dogmas* 

can now say, Produce your miracles ; we 
will show you miracles of greater power, 
equal to those of the hypnotist, and far tran- 
scending them. Greater authority must go 
with greater powers. 

The handful of seeming modern miracles is 
as nothing compared with those of Christ 
culminating in the resurrection. The hun- 
dreds of thousands of men and women, 
awaked by the trifling mysteries of spiritual- 
ism to a kind of living faith in the modern 
necromancer, the medium, and in the mod- 
ern exorcist, the clairvoyant, are evidence 
that the modern world needs straight doc- 
trine of the miraculous power Christ had 
of old to heal. You say the spiritualist is a 
man of moderate intelligence, and so try to 
throw the case out of court. Let me tell you 
that some of the brightest men I have known 
have been spiritualists. Take Mrs. Annie 
Besant, formerly a secularist, the friend and 
coadjutor of Charles Bradlaugh ; this woman 
has been noted as a hard atheist, believing 
only in materialism and denying all spiritu- 
ality. She has recently been expelled from 
her old society because of her adoption of 
the miracles of Madame Blavatsky as genuine 
and the acceptance of Blavatsky's account of 



Piracies as Helateb to ZTCobem £tfe. 73 

the wisdom she had drawn from the Mahat- 
mas. The truth of it is, no person's intellect- 
ual capacity is guaranty for right opinions. 
And the foolishest of notions that ever en- 
tered the heart of man is the dictum, " My 
way is the only way dictated by reason, and 
all who disagree are fools." 

Taking things as they are, we need the 
argument that the miracles of Christ and His 
Apostles transcend all others, and therefore 
that the moral authority of Christ transcends 
all others. So long as spiritualists, hypnotists, 
theosophists, Mormons, cannot raise the dead, 
they cannot produce authority enough to 
show their right to be regarded as the 
moral teachers of mankind, God not having 
given them supernatural powers confirma- 
tory thereof. Science, as meeting these new 
errors, cannot overcome them. It can and is 
for the first time cataloguing their manifesta- 
tions ; it cannot explain the phenomena any 
more than it can explain thought or life or 
death. A power revealed before the eyes of 
science becomes a phenomenon and is granted 
its place among the powers in exercise by 
men. It cannot break the force of authority 
granted thereby. The only power that can 
break the force of modern superstition is the 



74 HetD Concepts of £)lb Dogmas. 

power of the cross upheld in an elevated and 
central position by sign and wonder wrought 
by the God-man and continued among His 
personal disciples. What maintained Bou- 
langer with the French people, who took his 
life the other day at Brussels ? He was not a 
church man, for he said, in instructions given 
to generals concerning the officers under them 
while he was war minister of France, " It 
is unrepublican to go to the place called 
the church. " He was indeed the idol of the 
atheistical eight million in France and the 
half-breeds between them and Catholicism ; 
but he had the capacity of winning France 
by personal qualities much like those of the 
Great Napoleon. He was not great, but he 
was a pleasing personality, and was adored 
by thousands. 

Human nature having so much mate- 
rial to be inflamed by the possession of 
unusual qualities, is constant food for im- 
pression through the miraculous, the miracle 
of genius, or the miracle of mysteriously 
endowed personality. Give then, O man of 
God ! to the eager heart of humanity the 
divinely endowed Christ, that on the basis 
of a wonder-working, extraordinary person- 
ality men may lay the foundations of a super- 



UTtractes as Kelateb to XTTobern £tfe. 75 

natural morality ; that the world may not 
sink to the moral degradation of France, well 
typified by the fact that Gambetta, her fore- 
most patriot and orator, died at the hand of 
his mistress, while Boulanger, their greatest 
popular idol since Mirabeau, shoots himself 
over the grave of his dead paramour, es- 
tranged from wife and family. 

It seems to the preacher that while he thus 
defends the miracles of the New Testament, 
he must attack the Romish superstition of 
relics. If a handkerchief which had touched 
the flesh of Paul were preserved until now, 
would it have the same miraculous powers 
it did then ? Or in other words, were the di- 
vine miracles of Christ consequent upon the 
suffusement of material things with power? 
so that miraculously endowed things, coming 
in contact with others, would bestow miracu- 
lous endowment ? so that the holy coat of 
Treves, being once worn by our Saviour, 
hath miraculous powers to this day ? so that, 
as the great crowd of pilgrims, under the 
lead of their parish priests, files behind the 
high altar and past the smock-frocked brown- 
ish relic with a hole for neck and half sleeves, 
and looking as if made of old china silk, the 
nervous and trembling anxiety of the pil- 



76 Hem Concepts of £)lb Dogmas, 

grims is justified? and likewise the hope of 
mothers who now and then bring paralytic 
children, and of the devout who ask that 
rosary or other keepsake may be touched 
upon it by the attending priests in antici- 
pation that virtue thus communicated may 
be transferred to the sick, that they shall 
recover ? 

The New Testament miracles require im- 
mediateness and personality. It is always a 
dynamic power, not a slumbering or dor- 
mant one. 

The holy coat was discovered by Helena, 
the mother of Constantine. Newman, in his 
" Apologia Pro Vita Sua," says: " I think it 
impossible to withstand the evidence which 
is brought for the liquefaction of the blood of 
St. Januarius at Naples, and for the motion 
of the eyes of the pictures of Madonna in 
the Roman states. I see no reason to doubt 
the material of the Lombard crown at 
Monza, and I do not see why the holy coat 
at Treves may not have been what it pur- 
ports to be." This gives the true case be- 
tween Rome and Protestantism, as to modern 
miracles. That all living men, and not the 
least among them, Protestants, would ven- 
erate the garment of the Lord Jesus, if 



2T£tracles as Jfelateb to ZtTobern £tfe* 77 

handed down to us from antiquity, is un- 
doubted. We may even grant that there are 
true cases of faith healing among those re- 
ported from the German city, when many 
days over 40,000 pilgrims pass the shrine 
and two millions are expected to pass it ere 
the (tunica sacrosancta) Holy robe shall be 
sealed away from human sight until again in 
the twentieth century it shall be brought 
forth to the gaze of the devout multitudes. 

I say there may be real healings, God over- 
looking the poverty of human asking in the 
dire extremity of human need, turning its 
eyes in faith to the heavens. But the differ- 
ence between us remains ; if the garment is 
the true robe of Christ, it is but the decayed 
vestment without power ; it is not the 
vehicle in and of itself of the miraculous. 
The endowment was upon the nature of 
Jesus, the God-man, not upon His clothing ; 
and such remnants, if they exist, have no 
more power than mere rags. We preserve 
the coat of Washington ; we would preserve 
the coat of Christ if we might ; we re- 
spect the character of the one, we adore that 
of the other ; but we do not regard as sacred 
the garments of either, and the permission to 
see the one or the other is merely a gratifica- 



78 Hem Concepts of Vlb Dogmas* 

tion of curiosity or taste for the historic; 
namely, that we may gain knowledge of His 
appearance among men, and thus get some- 
what of the local coloring, and fuller sense of 
His authentic teaching. But as for power in 
the fiber of the garment which He wore, we 
deny it ; far less power hath it resisting de- 
cay than the blade of corn in the spring- 
time, pushing upward in the light, speaking 
of death indeed, but of death swallowed up 
in life, with which it is now endowed, each 
change in which, as it progresses from blade 
to ear and full corn in the ear, bespeaking 
a miraculous energy from the center of 
things to whose immortal benignity there 
are no miracles in things present or things 
to come, in life or death or any other creat- 
ure, as all things are of God and of God 
only — their source and their sum. 



THE FOREORDAINED GRACE 
OF GOD. 

"For whom He foreknew, He also foreordained 
to be conformed to the image of His Son, 
that He might be the firstborn among many 
brethren. ' ' — Rom. 8 : 2g. 

THIS sermon is like chapters in some books, 
— to be read or skipped. It is not milk 
for babes. If there is anybody here that is 
impatient under discussions of what is cur- 
rently termed Calvinism, they would better 
go out. The subject of God's sovereignty 
can only be treated fairly by those whose 
souls, like the eyes of eagles under the fierce 
rays of the sun, will be unblinking in the 
presence of eternal truth. I say this sermon 
may be heard or omitted. You can be a 
Christian, and not believe in God's sover- 
eignty. If you dissent from much or all of 
this sermon, is no matter. It is presumed no 
one will be lost because his head is dizzy, and 
he cannot climb mountain precipices or bear 
the looming, yawning chasms down the jaws 
of which it is terrible to look. One may 
hesitate to sit with the fates of awful mein to 

(79) 



80 Tuvo Concepts of £>lb Dogmas. 

see them spin the thread of life, and espe- 
cially while Atropos shall cut the thread. Let 
those turn their face that will ; but shall we 
deny that eternal laws take their course with- 
out obstruction, and that men and angels 
must submit ? What we do object to is that 
any person shall listen prejudiced to the 
questions treated. However, it must be 
added, as the conviction of the preacher, 
that it is impossible for a person with an 
illogical mind to understand the arguments 
on this subject. The bitterness with which 
foreordination and kindred topies are as- 
sailed is largely due to this incapacity. 
Further, the mastery of this subject cannot 
be attained at a leap ; it is a question for 
years of deliberation, and as in all philosophic 
questions, insight is granted only as a reward 
to patience. 

He who has the capacity to think philo- 
sophically can have but two horns to his 
dilemma, — either God's sovereignty, or athe- 
ism. Hence it is true that many of the 
highest intelligence must be Calvinists if 
they are Christians. That multitudes have 
failed to think it out is unfortunate ; the 
great doctrine of God's sovereignty then be- 
comes like the bur under Haley's saddle in 



e ^oreorbatneb ©race of <£>ob. 81 



" Uncle Tom's Cabin " — a constant irritant; 
as that bur made a bucking horse, so this doc- 
trine makes bucking men. But a man irri- 
tated, hackled, and out of temper, is not in 
the mood to consider a question as broad 
as the cosmos, as high as heaven, and as 
deep as hell. 

Foreordination is the vastest subject that 
can engross the attention of mankind, and 
at the same time is the fundamental question 
of religion. It touches human nature, and the 
mission of Christ alike. There are childish 
people who bow before shrines and who be- 
lieve as they are taught, to whom faith pre- 
sents no problems, and who do not consider 
the essentials of faith ; we condemn their 
superstition, or rather I should say we con- 
done it. But those persons who thus 
condone it are themselves guilty of an intel- 
lectual jugglery and blinking of the real 
questions of religion such that we are unable 
to say which category is the most unworthy. 

The Scriptures teach a science of God. 
From nature we learn that there is design 
in the universe, but can only conceive of 
events as occurring in series, that is, one after 
another. This design in nature of course 
bespeaks a designer, as truly, to use a famil- 
6 



82 Hem Concepts of £>15 Dogmas* 

iar illustration, as the serpent mound in Ohio, 
with gaping mouth, bespeaks a fabricator 
Now the question arises, whether the om- 
nipotence which creates, foreknows future 
events. A man may build a tiny craft, and 
make a miniature sail, and carry it to the 
edge of the lake, and let the west wind blow 
it out of sight. The power to create does 
not necessarily imply the power to foresee 
whether it would keel over and sink, or find 
the other shore, bearing a sealed message 
which another shall read. So, say some, in 
making man filled with the breath of life, 
there is not of necessity foreknowledge of 
all coasts on which he may land or of all 
choices which he may form. But that be- 
ing so making must have intelligence, and 
some sort of idea as to the probabilities 
of what may happen to this man whom he 
has made free. Can God make a power of 
choice which He does not foresee ? For in- 
stance, there is the power of thought when 
one idea arrests another, and so brings it 
above consciousness. Is it possible for Om- 
nipotence to make a brain capable of trans- 
mitting and originating ideas, and not know 
what it can produce ? To say He could, 
would be like saying that the inventor of a 



Cfye ^oreorbcrinefc ©race of (Sob* 83 

machine making nails could invent every 
part, set the machine up ready to bite the 
flat bar iron, and turn out a finished product, 
without trying whether it could do so or not, 
or knowing certainly that it could eat the 
iron and make the nail. If God made man, 
He must know his out-put, what with cer- 
tain motives will be sure choices. 

You may say this is not quite conclusive ; 
but add one thing to it, the fact that men 
consent to government, and thus human in- 
stitutions cohere, and that there is growth, 
life, decay of human institutions and civiliza- 
tions, for which there is land and country > 
the one suitable to sustenance, the other 
segregating them, so that men in govern- 
mental relations could not exist unless the 
theater of events had been prepared, and the 
human constitution been fitted by a super- 
natural wisdom for organic life in nations. 
That is, man could not live by hazard, there 
must be a fruitful soil and climate to support 
him, also there must be kindred blood to 
bind the various branches together ; there 
must be the coercive power over one mind 
of force directed by another, so that rebell- 
ious provinces shall be subdued. Mountain 
chains must build barriers to hem them in 



84 Tttxo Concepts of £)lb Dogmas. 

from outside influences, and harsh weather 
from northern skies must put iron in their 
blood. God must have sagacity enough to 
know what a man will think in a certain case. 

God is in the world pulling on the very- 
verges of the cosmos, making Arcturus and 
all his train do His bidding. Is that a dead 
vitality ? Does it not show an instinct in that 
each star has a law which pulls one way, 
binding the spheres in their courses? Does 
not each chemical combination show an in- 
stinct at least ? that is, it always acts the same, 
proving intelligence like that of the horse 
that knows the way along the road over 
which he has passed to his own barn. 

There is no such thing as law without life ; 
there is no such thing as life without intel- 
ligence behind it, giving the law of its being. 
As God's spirit is in all animate creation and 
manifesting intelligence ; is that same spirit 
not in man, the sustainer of his life, the 
recognizer of his every act, the illuminator 
of his conscience ? " This is the light which 
lighteth every man that cometh into the 
world." Law is but the external descrip- 
tion of God's intelligent working in natural 
things ; it is not an abstract essence ; it is 
a living presence, the heart of the material 



Cfye ^oreorbatneb ©race of <S5o&* 85 

thing. Everywhere present, everywhere in- 
telligent, He must have cognizance of man's 
thought of whose principle of life He is the 
core, and without whose spirit in its mem- 
bers, the human body could not exist. This 
is a course of reasoning extra-scriptural, but 
leading to the scriptural point of view. This 
philosophy explains man's true freedom. 

There is a hypothesis which presents itself 
as an alternative to foreordination ; namely, 
that of foreknowledge pure and simple. I 
have tried to prove that God foreknows ; I 
want to prove something more. God fore- 
knows, therefore foreordains, is this other 
theory. That is, He knows the choices of 
each free agent, and foreordains according to 
the foreseen acts of each. In other words, it 
has been decreed from all eternity that each 
man shall do as he pleases. But a free act 
foreseen, and because foreseen, fated, is an 
act without an element of freedom in so far as 
it is a God-compelled act. To foreknow and 
then decree is the only kind of a decree 
possible by any personality. Our boasted 
freedom, therefore, becomes fatalism through 
circuitous terms. Foreordination becomes 
foreknowledge in an interchangeable way, a 
kind of sophistry running in a circle. The 



86 Hem Concepts of £>lb Dogmas. 

foreknowledge by God of His own acts is a 
foreknowledge of freedom ; a foreknowledge 
of a freedom of others dependent upon en- 
vironment is equivalent to fatality. It is 
freedom for God and not for men. In other 
words, the Armenian hypothesis is fatalism ; 
namely, that each man can do what God has 
foreseen and determined ; which is equivalent 
to this, that every man does as he must, and 
must do as he does. Whatever is, is right. 

Now suppose we say that God foreordains 
all things, whatsoever comes to pass, without 
regard to man's choice, but in His forewill- 
ing and foreordaining, preserves the integ- 
rity of each human will. Sometimes these 
wills decide as He would have them, He fore- 
knew it, but He did not by decreeing compel 
obedience. That there was something in a 
man's make-up and in the environment of his 
life, which has resulted in choices of good and 
in the love of God, is due to omnipotence, 
but it does not interfere with freedom. Then 
how about those souls who, under the in- 
fluence of the Holy Ghost and the opportuni- 
ties of divine providence, reject Christ and 
all good ? Are they lost ? Says the Armin- 
ian, Yes ! Says the Calvinist, By no means. 
God has only begun when He is rejected. 



Oje ^oreorbatneb ©race of (Bob* 87 

Heaven and earth are daily witnessing God's 
workings in behalf of those who have defi- 
nitely rejected Christ. A thousand sorrows 
may be required to bring one heart into 
obedience to the Lord, which He grants, not 
that a will may be broken, but that a soul 
may be saved and a new heart created. 
Another let us hope has a vicissitude of pros- 
perity, that through prosperity he may find 
a new motive in life. For most of us, how- 
ever, God mingles the cup ; pleasure and 
sorrow, comfort and pain, ecstasy of joy, and 
dolor of suffering are all ours, that out of a 
composite experience a child of God may be 
brought near to the Father's heart, and 
despite wrong choices of will, may yet in 
freedom know what it is to love God. 

The preacher doubts if one of us first 
turned to God. The rather is our redemp- 
tion to be traced to His unbending purpose 
to bring us in freedom to choice of good. 
That He cannot save all men is undoubtedly 
true. To believe that He would is to fly in 
face of the analogies of human experience, 
which sees evil choices abounding unshaken 
in many souls, and likewise is contrary to 
the word of Christ, the revealer of God's will. 
But that He does save myriads by His free 



88 Hem (Concepts of £>16 Dogmas. 

grace, in spite of themselves, and doth bring 
them free in full consciousness of their free- 
dom into the kingdom of God, is to me the 
only consistent doctrine which harmonizes hu- 
man freedom and divine sovereignty. Either 
there is no God, or this is about the state- 
ment of His being and nature. If there is a 
plan and purpose behind nature and life, 
there must be this harmonization or the 
equivalent. God knows what natural law 
will bring to human hearts, and likewise 
freedom ; He will save sometimes in spite of 
law, sometimes by law. He will save some- 
times by freedom, and sometimes in spite of 
freedom, though consistently therewith. It 
is all of His grace and love. For with me 
the other alternative is that God made the 
world and set it a-going, so that all things 
run by chance, a kind of Pandora's box, full 
of evils, He himself standing helplessly by, 
sorry now that He did it, but helpless to 
avert the catastrophes which have resulted. 
Well may such believe the story of His gift 
of Christ simply a fake, like a green turnip 
at a horsed nose ; all very well for the horse 
that likes it, but to be rejected by the horse 
that does not. Said Christ, " Ye have not 
chosen me, but I have chosen you, and or- 
dained you, that ye should bear much fruit." 



GOD IS LOVE. 

" For God is love." — I John 4 ; 8. 

FOUR hundred millions of men the world 
over are keeping holy time this Lent, in 
that act showing the common bonds of Chris- 
tian faith ; thrice as many more do not recog- 
nize the bond by similar symbolic acts of 
devotion. But who of us that is one with the 
Christian church in recognition of the supreme 
value of the life of Christ, does not rejoice that 
he can take upon his lips the electrifying 
words, " I am a Christian," and that he is not 
a pagan ? We are told that from the mouths 
of the Nile in the delta of Egypt to its 
sources in the great central African lakes, 
there is every diversity of human circum- 
stance under the sun, and all under anti- 
Christian knowledge and forms of religious 
belief. The country about the mouth of the 
Nile is distinctly out of joint with the civili- 
zation of Europe, with which it has been in 
contact since history began, and it never yet 
invaded the seats of barbarism above, toward 
the source of the mighty floods which were 
generated in the heart of the continent in a 

(89) 



90 Xitvo Concepts of £)16 Dogmas. 

manner unknown, and which at their an- 
nual rise were gratefully accepted, as the 
nourisher of life in the whole Nile basin. 
At length the vail has been lifted upon four 
thousand miles of pagan country. And 
though it is new and strange, yet from the 
granite palaces of Cairo, where, enshrined in 
luxury and ease, the natural man panders to 
his baser nature, with all the increased en- 
dowment and environment derived from 
commerce with Christendom, to the most in- 
significant savage of the marshes in the 
equatorial provinces, viewing men, do we 
not thank God we are not as they are ? And 
would not the poorest and most wretched 
Christian hesitate to exchange his poverty 
for the riches of an oriental civilization, 
which with such blandishments of the creat- 
ure would make man a pagan as the price of 
such a heritage ? And what is the difference, 
so world-wide ? Define it, that we may make 
it ours and understand our privilege. Ah ! 
yes, I would if I could. 

Deeper than man's choices are these ine- 
radicable diversities of human nature im- 
planted in his constitution by the divine 
Wisdom, and finding their ultimate expression 
in the heart and character of Christ. But 



(Bob is £ot>e, 91 



one thing in considerable fullness is testified 
to by the Christian observance of Lent ; it is 
the testimony of love to love, and is a recog- 
nition that love is eternal. Jesus suffered 
because He loved ; God sent Him because He 
loved. We love Them because They first 
loved us. Jesus bearing the burden of the 
approaching sacrifice with courage, weighed 
down by foreboding, yet immutable in His 
purpose, is the Jesus whose self-sacrificing 
love we this day recognize. 

In the heart of Africa, under the moon- 
light, the lonely village built around huge, 
monumental bowlders left by antediluvian 
floods, is asleep, for men, whether savage 
or civilized, must take their rest. They 
hear the sharp blows of a hatchet upon the 
stockade of wattled poles that surrounds 
it. The men seize their poisoned arrows 
and such other weapons as they have, 
and run out to the defense of their home 
huts, to be met as they go beyond their 
thresholds by leaden rain from Arab rifles. 
They fall prostrate ; mothers, shrinking, hide 
their children, and peering out into the dark- 
ness, illumined by the torch which has now 
been laid to the straw thatches, look for 
chance of escape, as wild beasts surprised by 



92 Hem Concepts of £>lb Dogmas. 

prairie-fires, only that they have less courage 
than the beasts, according as they know 
better the cruel temper of the manslayer 
behind the rifle. Poor hunted creatures 
they are, from the first stroke of the ax to 
the last act of the bloody drama of the star- 
lighted plain. This is man's humanity to 
man. The knowledge of their possession of 
a few hundred pounds of elephant tusks 
easily exchangeable for gold, or the desire 
for women and girls as slaves, or the hatred 
engendered in petty border strifes, are all 
the motive needed for such foul scenes of 
blood. Let them, who would deify humanity, 
acknowledge their God. 

Let us take another picture. A Child is 
born into a poor carpenter's family ; under 
the meagerest conditions of earthly wealth, 
without favor and without power, living un- 
der the tyranny of the mightiest government 
of antiquity at its worst ; and while never 
favoring injustice in the least, yet never 
showing the slightest temper of hatred for 
the oppressor. Meeting only hypocrites with 
scorn, and going on calmly with a proclama- 
tion of love and mercy, and with a life of 
self-sacrifice, under the white light of which 
all His doctrines disappear as candles are 



(gob is Cope. 93 



outshone under the arc streaming with elec- 
tric splendor, so much more is doing than 
professing, so much more is life than creed, 
and in that frame of mind set as a flint in 
love and compassion for us, He dies. This 
man Christianity reverently says was the 
only begotten Son of God, and strives to 
identify itself with Him, and fashion its 
temper like His, making hard endeavor to 
shroud its poverty of good in His benignity 
and worth, feeling that only as through Him 
and of Him, as the great pledge of the eter- 
nal nature of God's love, can there be any 
foundation for hope of man's redemption 
from sin, and restoration to the arms of an 
offended God. Leaving aside the deeper life 
under Christian faith, there is yet to every 
Christian man a unique significance in the 
whole life of Christ. 

Did you ever think of the difference be- 
tween God as an abstract creation of the 
human intellect, quiescent and absolute, and 
of God actively interested in the affairs of 
this life ? Of this latter attitude Jesus Christ 
is the great proof. Granting that Jesus was 
the only begotten Son of God, then the in- 
finite Father could not view with indifference 
the excursion of the incarnated sonship into 



94 Hem Concepts of Vlb Dogmas* 

the domains of men, And granted that the 
Father sent forth the Son to redeem, then 
His love going with Him would attach itself 
to the creatures and the created universe 
whither He went forth on His errand of re- 
demption. 

There is a story going the rounds that 
Stanley had offered himself to the woman of 
his choice, and not having received an answer, 
plunged off into the Dark Continent, on the 
rescue of Emin Pasha. If this be true, and 
the heart of the woman turned toward him, 
what must have been her suspense when his 
death seemed assured ; after tidings had 
turned in his favor, do you not believe that 
the woman's heart had interest in every one 
of that same mission, particularly in Emin 
and his men, for whom that rescue was un- 
dertaken ? Even so must the interest of God 
have covered every creature for whom Christ 
went on a mission of redemption, desperate 
in its character and terrible in its ordeals 
of tear-compelling sufferings. Granted the 
revelation of the love of God for Christ, a 
love by its nature unending, and extending 
to the meanest and poorest whom Christ 
loved because God loves his only Son ; and 
granting one thing more, which Christianity 



(Sob is £or>e, 95 



teaches, namely, that man was made in the 
image and likeness of God in his first estate, 
and that first impression has never been 
wholly effaced, do not the bronze hinges of 
one more temple door swing open to the hu- 
man imagination, namely, the door of the 
temple of love ? Do we not see that if our 
earthly love is like the love of God for His 
dear Son, the love of the weakest human heart 
is eternal, like the love of God ? 

This is the characteristic of the Christian 
revelation which I bring before you, that 
love is eternal because God is love. Heathen 
men have known this love for others of their 
kind. Damon placed himself in the hands 
of Dionysius to be put to death if Pythias, 
going to arrange his affairs, should not 
return, but before the execution, Pythias 
came back to save his friend from death. 
Husbands loved their wives, fathers loved 
their children, but they did not know that 
love was eternal. Hoping, as some did, that 
there might be some sort of immortality for 
the soul after death, they did not know the 
immortality of love. Mothers can now love 
their own with assurance, knowing that love is 
eternal. Husband and wife can now love 
each other till death them do part, and hold 



96 Hetp Concepts of £)lb Dogmas. 

with clinging hands the hand of death in 
love, for love is eternal. Friend can love 
friend through long years of happy life, so 
far as each other is concerned, and even in 
the solitudes rendered solitary, because they 
are their accustomed haunts made desolate 
by death, may have a kind of quiet peace, 
for we know that love is eternal. 

But love cannot be scattered if it is to be 
abiding. The eternal sort of love is not that 
which finds new objects of affection supplant- 
ing the old. Were this not true, we might 
say the favor of the courtesan and the adul- 
terer was love. Love that is eternal is meas- 
ured, and loves to sit solitary with its beloved. 
Carlyle, when poor, lived at Craigenputtoch 
on a little farm that had fallen as a heritage 
to his wife. He was immersed in literary 
pursuits, laying the foundation of his ultimate 
fame ; and while he delved in the literary 
workshop, his wife delved in the kitchen. A 
weak frame was taxed with the heavy work 
of the farm, and trembling fingers were worn 
to the quick, and the soft hand, nurtured 
in ease, grew rough and calloused. But 
though the seeds of invalidism were most 
thoroughly sown, one thing was gained, 
namely, the whole-hearted affection of her 



(gob is £ose, 97 



husband. I am willing to grant that such 
sacrifices ought not to be required, but yet 
it remains that just such sacrifices are the 
infallible proofs of eternal love. Livingstone 
died to have his body carried on the backs 
of porters under the guidance of the faithful 
Susi and Chuma eight months, because he 
had loved them, and love is eternal. A great 
philanthropist, suspecting the woman whom 
he was about to marry loved another, asked 
her if his suspicions were well founded, and 
receiving frank answer that she really had 
loved another for years, to whom she had 
not been married because they both were 
poor, released her of her pledge, gave money 
to the impecunious man to establish him in 
business, saw them married, and lived alone 
all his life ; true love not hesitating to make 
its object happy at the price of its money, 
and forgetful of personal discomforture, be- 
cause love is eternal. 

All I can say is, Love in man is like love 
in God, it is eternal. Love on, for love is 
God-like, and remember that no labor of love 
is lost, for it is eternal. Each act partakes of 
the nature of the motive behind it. The kiss 
of love is more than a kiss, it is a token. 
The prayer of love is more than a prayer, it 
7 



98 £lero Concepts of £)lb Dogmas* 

is a benediction. For is there not in the 
mother's heart that which makes her ready- 
to face the flames if thereby the flame shall 
be robbed of its prey ? Will it not throttle 
and kill if bloodshed will spare the inno- 
cence and sweetness of girlhood ? To 
avenge its wrongs, is it not in spirit 
like an avenging lioness, smiting with heavy 
hand of the law ? or when the law fails, 
does it not direct the avenging bullet ? 
Will not the mother rob her half-covered 
breasts of their covering that her babe may 
be warm ? Are not, then, that mother's kisses 
pledges of affection too deep for the storms 
of time to efface ? Are not her prayers 
turned to blessings by her own hand the 
next moment ? And all because love is eter- 
nal, and love is of God, and like Him eternal. 
No caress of love can be lost, nor is any 
loved one past our recognition ; for love is 
eternal. When you go home to-day, kiss 
the babe more tenderly, for love is eternal. 
Be kinder to your best friends, for love is 
eternal, and God is love. 



OBEDIENCE DEMANDED. 

" But Jesus said unto him, No man, having put 
his hand to the plow, and looking back, is 
fit for the kingdom of God." — Luke q : 62, 

IT is hard for us to gather a realistic idea 
of the Galilean husbandman ; he was a 
peasant born on the land. His fathers had 
become prosperous when they ceased to be 
nomads, and became tillers of the soil ; Isaac 
and Jacob cultivated more than Abraham. 
The problem of civilization is the problem of 
the land ; the ancient Aryan derived his title, 
we are told, from a term meaning "to plow." 
They were plowers among herdsmen in the 
far-off East, where they began the develop- 
ment of modern Indo-European civilizations. 
But the irksomeness of toil never ceases ; 
while the wild aborigines cannot bear it, the 
civilized man shirks it, and bemoans his task, 
" I am a toiler from the cradle to the 
grave," is the true plaint of the generations. 
When Christian eyes behold the country 
about Capernaum, from which city our Lord 
was about to set out for the last time, they 
cannot tell the exact site, or the many 

(99) 



100 teem Concepts of £)lb Dogmas. 

changes of the physical features. That rude 
plow of the modern tiller of the soil is able 
to give a notion of that which may have 
come under our Lord's eye as He saw the 
field laborer afar off driving his bullocks 
crookedly because looking earnestly at the 
sports of his comrades, from whom he was 
unwillingly withdrawn to his task, and thus 
furnished the theme of this little parable, 
only once mentioned in the Gospels. 

We can study modern Palestine and the 
parts adjacent for hints of the realism of the 
time. There was over that tiller God's 
blessed sunshine ; around him the plain ; be- 
yond, against the horizon, the blue hills of 
dear Galilee ; upon him rested the eyes of 
the Son of man, and curious, questioning eyes 
of many disciples ; for He soon sent forth 
the seventy to preach and to heal. Clothe 
him as you will, delineate to your imagina- 
tion his form and face, such is the aim of 
the modern Christian realist, but the man, 
ah ! him. His soul state is preserved to us 
like the insect in amber ; whatever his sur- 
roundings, his knowledge, or his labor, we 
know that man. Every one knows what it 
is to be driven like a slave to his task, knows 
what it is to have an unwilling mind yoked 



£)beMence Demanbeb* 101 

to a compelled body, and to go scratching 
over the light soil, driving a yoke of bullocks- 

There is a small school of thinkers in 
Germany who endeavor to apply the laws of 
mathematical certitude to the phenomena of 
the human mind. Thought, feeling, sensa- 
tions, etc., are simply representations, which 
in the mind are opposed to one another ; if 
one representation does not arrest another, 
it is simply lost ; it has not come above the 
threshold of consciousness. 

Just such a genesis of ideas our Lord por- 
trayed nineteen centuries ago in this parable ; 
desires are appealing to the consciousness of 
that young husbandman ; his will decides the 
body must answer for its task ; but the mind 
roams, and the zigzag furrow testifies of the 
conflicting motives ; these are representations 
in arrest, says the scientist ; these are motives 
at variance, saith Jesus. " Being is absolute 
position," says Herbart, neglecting to define 
it ; Christ simply assumes the existence of 
our eternal natures, and photographs for all 
time the soul in travail betwixt two opinions, 
the "must" and the "I will not." The plain, 
unlettered Christian, with his finger upon this 
text, has, ever since the English Bible was 
translated, had more psychology at his fingers' 



102 Tuvo Concepts of £)R> Dogmas. 

tips than all science, until through Aristotle 
this modern school, groping its way in the 
Stygian darkness of the soul left to its own 
native light, hath at length, unbeknown to 
itself, touched the hem of the Master's gar- 
ment. Men wonder at the power of the 
English Bible, and behind it all, above the 
most obvious things, remains as one most 
important factor the soul knowledge that it 
gives. No man of ordinary education knows 
himself in all the recesses of his soul nature, 
who has not thumbed the New Testament. 
And no gifted philosopher, however much he 
may know tongues and systems, so long as 
he allies himself with the world spirit which 
is against God, can ever hope to attain unto 
the knowledge of the human heart which the 
devout man enjoys, who prays God to en- 
lighten him as he reads, and who, by reason 
of his sympathetic interest, is quick to apply 
the teaching to himself and learn the height 
and breadth of his heart. 

Our text reveals just what human experi- 
ence declares, that indecision is the bane of 
life. There are all about us men who in 
their good moments are saints and in their 
bad moments devils. There have been many 
Dick Steeles who can prepare for debauchery 



£)beMertee Demcmbeb, 103 

by long dissertations on morality ; and this 
because, putting their hands to the plow, 
they look back ; they start the furrow well, 
but they do not finish it ; they have all the 
maxims of commonplace religion on their 
tongues, but they do not give the heart and 
purpose to the case in hand. Their thought 
is behind them, when it should in aspiration 
stretch out before them to the accomplish- 
ment of their labor ; the allurements of the 
past clog the will, deaden their interest in 
the work God has set them to do ; they zig- 
zag their course. The kingdom of heaven 
is not won in such a way. An epistle well 
puts this same truth : "For he that doubteth 
is like the surge of the sea, driven by the 
wind and tossed." Again, the same epistle 
says, "The double-minded man is unstable 
in all his ways." It is well, then, for us, 
when our imaginations are on the past, that 
we remember to keep our eyes upon the 
present, because Christ requires a straight 
furrow ; and that we do not allow past de- 
lights to enervate and weaken the resolu- 
tion of the heart. " Keep thy heart with all 
diligence, for out of it are the issues of life." 
It is, I think, noticeable that Christ does 
not ask us to preserve in our souls an equi- 



104 Tizvo Concepts of £)15 Dogmas* 

librium of motives; "He that is not for me 
is against me." This presents a strong con- 
trast to much of the current thought of our 
time ; it is in favor to say, " My mind is in the 
balance ; I see good in both sides. I am not 
able to declare myself." Indeed, it is claimed 
that it is a sign of mental power that one 
vacillates back and forth between two opin- 
ions, calling forth, as it did recently from a 
distinguished preacher, the comment that 
such an equilibrium was proof of mental 
weakness rather than of stronger qualities 
of the intellect. However that may be, the 
primary question here is concerning the 
mind of Christ. His disapproval of spir- 
itual indeterminateness is pronounced ; that 
man is portrayed in a sentence, " He that 
hath his hand upon the plow, and looketh 
back." Jesus gives no sanction to divided 
affections or divided metal states. If you 
are in equilibrium, put yourself out of it ; for 
that very pose between Christ and the 
world, that air of haughty indifference, that 
assumed superiority over those who decide 
for Him, is proof final and conclusive of your 
lack. Do not believe that a vacillating pur- 
pose can win the guerdon of His approval. 
Do not believe that an intellectual accept- 



£)bebtence 2)emanbeb, 105 

ance of Christ is enough, while your heart- 
strings, entwined about other loves and 
other passions than His, are tugging to draw 
you back to the world. 

This brings us face to face with the fun- 
damental doctrine of our text ; that Jesus 
Christ demands complete soul surrender of 
heart and of life on the part of those who 
are true believers. No qualification can hide 
this blemish ; no excuse can be pleaded 
against this judgment ; they are not fit. 
And at the same time no lack can be pleaded 
against those thus qualified by decision ; to 
criticise the lack of a true believer, accord- 
ing to Christ's definition, is to exalt one's 
self to the position of critic of the Master. 

As all roads led of old to Rome, so all con- 
ceptions of Christian duty lead to Christ. The 
photographs of the ancient Italian painters, 
so far as they have come under my notice, 
give to the Master a beatific and exalted ex- 
pression of tenderness. The defects of these 
paintings are their beauty, for which there 
is no foundation in the Gospels, the absence 
of any trace of soul struggle, such as Geth- 
semane must have left on Him, and an ap- 
pearance of self-esteem such as in our time 
marks the countenances only of egotists and 



106 Hem Concepts of £>lb Dogmas* 

mystics. That there is somewhat of church 
tradition behind these representations, is un- 
doubtedly true ; but at most it is only tra- 
dition ; they are church likenesses. The 
modern painters have erred in giving too 
intellectual an appearance ; you see superb 
intelligence, precocious and brilliant features. 
But a Roman Catholic artist, Munkacsy, 
has at length painted a Protestant Christ ; it 
is a picture of superb power ; every form in 
it is faultlessly posed. The scene is laid in 
the judgment hall. Pilate on his throne, a 
hard headed, sensual autocrat, conscious of 
his strength and yet doubting whether to sac- 
rifice the so-called King of the Jews to fanat- 
ical enemies, is portrayed with all his doubts 
upon him, as he listens to the old man 
Caiphas, the high priest, the bombastic pros- 
ecutor, who with swelling indignation and 
self-contained manner presents the substance 
of the charge. Behind Caiphas sits in garnet 
robes and defiant aspect a rich Pharisee, who 
with contemptuous and haughty pride views 
the Christ. There are one or two sympa- 
thetic countenances ; but the crowd in gen- 
eral has the appearance of being interested 
in the prosecution and anxious for the re- 
sult. One of the rabble officiously inflicts 



£)bebtenee Demanbeb, 107 

an insult, another shouts aloud, " Crucify 
Him ! " But that Christ is worth traveling 
many miles to see. It is criticised, but 
to me it appears well-nigh faultless. The 
God-man is shown to be strung with im- 
mense tension. His hands, bound before 
Him, alone restrain Him from vigorous gest- 
ure, and yet in all the pressure under which He 
labors, you see Him completely under con- 
trol. His face is that of one hunted to death, 
but the resolution which speaketh from His 
eyes is unconquerable. This is the Galilean 
at bay, the compassionate Jesus himself need- 
ing compassion ; this is the wrung soul which 
prayed, " Father, if it be Thy will, let this cup 
pass from Me." 

A Christ of such resolution is the Christ 
who speaks from our text. At the time of 
its utterance He was indeed under less press- 
ure, but He is the same uncompromising, 
fearless, exacting personality in all things 
which make for righteousness. He demands 
thy unconditional obedience. 



CARL MARR'S FLAGELLANTS. 

' * If ye love Me, keep My commandments. ' ' — 
John 14 : 75. 

CARL MARR, the painter of "The Flagel- 
lants," was born in Milwaukee. After an 
unsuccessful attempt to support himself there 
as a painter, in 1880 he returned to Munich 
by way of Boston and New York. His con- 
nection with a city so near us certainly height- 
ens the interest we feel in his work. From 
1885 to 1889 he labored on this canvas, 
rather more than ten feet wide. This is ap- 
proximately half the length of time bestowed 
by the mighty Angelo upon "The Last Judg- 
ment," who spent seven years upon but rela- 
tively a few more figures. But while Angelo 
painted no less than five distinct paintings, 
each one of which might have been dissevered 
and been separately framed, Marr gives us 
but one concept. Notice, too, the difference 
in choice of subjects ; while Angelo paints 
the resurrection from the dead, the judgment 
seat of Christ, the condemnation of the 
wicked, and Charon ferrying the souls of the 
(108) 



Carl VTiavvs flagellants. 109 

dead across to Hades, Marr paints a mediaeval 
church scene. Angelo soars on the wing of 
imagination, and reveals glimpses of hidden 
mysteries of religion which are the symbols 
of faith ; Marr reveals a time about three 
centuries previous to Angelo's day, the like 
of which Angelo himself may have seen, and 
displays the external form of that faith of 
which Angelo gave the content. That Marr 
selects one of the excrescences in church life, 
is no criticism ; it illustrates that very pecul- 
iarity, and casts side light upon that same 
faith. Angelo's " Last Judgment " and Marr's 
" Flagellants " present about the same con- 
trast that is to be found between the ordi- 
nary Protestant faith of our time, and the 
actions of the colored Christians of the South 
during the moments of frenzy in their relig- 
ious meetings ; it is the content of faith over 
against the outward manifestation of what 
a disordered imagination esteems to be a 
natural inference from, or adjunct of, that 
faith. The devotion of faith may take varied 
forms, and it is its effort to make some act or 
acts of devotion of especial value in the sight 
of God so that it shall prevail for the forgive- 
ness of sins. Hence we find sacrifice per- 
verted in the Old Testament so that its 



110 Titxo Concepts of £)lb Dogmas. 

sacrificial nature is lost sight of, and the 
sacrificial act comes to have the virtue of a 
fetich in itself, until the Psalmist exclaims : — 

" Sacrifice and offering Thou hadst no delight in; 
Mine ears hast thou opened : 
Burnt-offering and sin-offering hast Thou not 
required. 
Then said I, Lo, I am come; 
In the roll of the book it is written of me : 
I delight to do Thy will, O my God." 

This is quoted concerning Christ in the 
ioth chapter of Hebrews, the mighty epistle 
of the atonement. Similarly, Christ quoted 
and explained the Old Testament in Matt. 
9:13: " But go ye and learn what this 
meaneth, I desire mercy, and not sacrifice : 
for I came not to call the righteous, but 
sinners." So, too, may we quote our text: 
4< If ye love me, keep my commandments," 
as giving Christ's own emphasis upon the 
ethics of life. 

Let us see how these Christian Flagellants 
illustrated their conception of faith. They 
appeared in the nth century, but the first 
widespread impression made was this which 
arose from their self- beatings along the 
streets of Perugia, which is only a hundred 
and fifty miles from Rome itself. The im- 



£arl ITTarr's flagellants. Ill 

mediate occasion was the terrible state of 
fear into which Italy was then plunged by 
the horrors of the Guelph and Ghibelline 
wars, which were in brief the Papacy against 
the princes and the neighboring free cities 
of Italy. From Perugia they spread over 
Southern and Western Europe ; they reap- 
peared during the black death in 1348, and 
during the famine, pestilence, and war threat- 
ened in the days of the Turkish invasion of 
Europe in 1399; the excitement of the time 
being heightened by one of the periodic 
scares of Christendom over the predicted 
end of the world. 

These are their prominent appearances, if 
we add that of 1417, when they were under 
the lead of St. Vincent. Their minor appear- 
ances, however, were numerous, the last re- 
corded being at Lisbon, Portugal, in 1820. 
They seem to have formed a brotherhood, 
which maintained its organization through 
several centuries. At some periods they 
were despised and persecuted by the church 
in whose bosom they were nourished and of 
whose doctrine they were the natural out- 
growth. At Perugia, however, at the time 
of Rainer, they were demonstrating in be- 
half of the Guelph or Papal party. A writer 



112 Hem Concepts of £)lb Dogmas. 

says: " Great numbers of the inhabitants of 
this city, noble and ignoble, old and young, 
traversed the streets, carrying in their hands 
leathern thongs, with which, according to the 
chronicle of the monk of Padua, t they drew 
forth blood from their tortured bodies, amid 
sighs and tears, singing at the same time 
penitential psalms, and entreating the com- 
passion of the Deity/ They laid great stress 
upon the baptism of blood obtained by means 
of the scourge. " It was a kind of national 
fast and humiliation for the sins of the peo- 
ple, by which they hoped to escape the ter- 
rible bloodshed of their time. 

In Marr's picture, Rainer is a remarkable 
figure, clad in the black of his monk's or- 
der, but he has a dark, wolfish face. That 
man, as Marr has painted him, is cruel, fana- 
tical, shrewd, determined. At the one side is 
the young athlete laying on the blows vig- 
orously, with the spirit of self-glorification 
in his very pose ; he has come out to show 
the thronging crowd how to do it, and hopes 
to win their applause ; his spirit is like 
that of the young Comanche buck in the 
war dance. You feel you would like to be 
there and see him, he is so nervy. A little 
behind Rainer is an old man, past his prime, 



Carl VTiavt's flagellants. 113 

but with the strength of his prime still in 
him. His is a different spirit ; a troubled 
mind finds relief in the self-inflicted lash ; his 
bleeding memory finds panacea for its shame 
in each stinging blow ; the scourge he wields 
is but the external symbol of the inner casti- 
gations of conscience ; the suffering without 
is the veriest trifle compared therewith, and 
the deeper it cuts the better, for a good 
wincing blow doth grant relief to the pent-up 
pressures within. At the old man's side is a 
beautiful girl of fourteen summers, with her 
pure hands folded meekly across her breast, 
her features expressing the sorrow which has 
been pressed upon her by the common rumor 
of the town, or by the preaching of Rainer 
here with the beetling brow. She has done 
nothing to be repented ; she has no thong ; 
such youth and innocence cannot be so 
harshly treated. Rainer, who leads the pro- 
cession, is looking back to her reservedly, as 
if amid his general unconcern at the brutality 
of the blood-stained backs he would refresh 
himself by a half glance at such lovely saintli- 
ness. Beside is borne upon men's shoulders 
a figure of the crucified Jesus, whom all pro- 
fess to serve, young man, old man, maiden, 
and monk. It is heavy, graven work, of more 



114 Hetr> Concepts of £>16 Dogmas* 

cost than the price put upon the head of 
the matchless Christ, whose image is only 
the dumb, dead show of Him whose death 
was priceless as His life was unique, and 
doubtless inferior to some other work, in some 
other Umbrian city, by some more celebrated 
artist ; and yet Perugia in the first glows of 
its artistic splendor treasures it, and the cold 
heart of Rainer is proud to have it here at 
the head of his procession, for that is all 
which is given us in detail by the artist. 

And here they bear a dead image of Christ, 
who have need enough to know a living and 
resurrected Son of God. Suppose this boy, 
so masterful, should look back and see instead 
of a wooden thing forming a part of street- 
show pomp, a true vision of the real Christ ; 
would not the true manliness of that real 
Christ appeal to him, so bravely making 
show of a heroism that is rudely veiled 
brute force ? and should he see the true hu- 
mility of the Son of man, would he not be 
stricken dumb, because that instant the dark- 
ness within him of his own self-glorification 
was overwhelmed by the meekness of the 
gentle Christ ? What pity that the old sin- 
ner, blindly looking straight ahead and 
piteously seeking distraction from the ever- 



Carl ZTCarr's flagellants, 115 

present wickedness of his heart, by the sting 
of his self-inflicted blow, might not look there 
to see a face of flesh in the death agony, in 
order that sin might be forgiven and the 
penitent sinner find relief through a pardon 
bought by blood ! How sweet it would be 
if that dear girl should but look that way 
in the dew of her youth and in the fresh- 
ness of her untainted spirit ! If the old 
fox Rainer should turn there, what shame 
must be his, when his malignity and false- 
ness stands face to face with the holiness of 
the Son of God. But this does not intervene, 
the pageant proceeds, bearing the lifeless 
image of a dead Christ. 

We know now how this all came about ; 
that Rainer represented a scheming Papacy^ 
which, seizing upon the flagellant principle, 
sporadically and obscurely practiced and out 
of sight, through its devoted monk organized 
a gigantic and scenic appeal, to heaven osten- 
sibly, but really an appeal to men, that they 
should rise to the help of the Lord's repre- 
sentative on earth, and so end the sorrows of 
the land by consigning all of the earth in 
sight to a ruling Pope, God's vicegerent on 
earth. No wonder the artist has painted 
cunning in the face of Rainer the tool 



116 Ticw Concepts of £)lb Dogmas, 

The other figures represent well the classes 
whom they relied upon for support, — the in- 
nocent, the remorseful, and the vainglorious. 
So it has ever been the need, a living Christ 
in the hearts of the people ; the fact, the 
living church dead to the most deeply sig- 
nificant acts of the life of Christ ; or to state 
it differently : the fact, a living church of the 
dead Christ reaching out its Catholic Apos- 
tolic hands — and what hands they are! — 
for pelf and power. It was apprehension of 
this that led Michael Angelo to paint his 
"Pieta," which represented the Holy Mother 
holding the dead Christ upon her knees, fit 
type and symbol of the thought and attitude 
of all in that day who honored the command- 
ment of Christ. 

The need of that age and the need of every 
other is a living faith in the true and real Son 
of God, who ever liveth in heaven, the guide 
and helper of his sincere disciples; the re- 
ality, alas, is too often a dead faith supplanted 
by a vain hope of attaining the rewards of 
faith through atoning blood by the arts of 
self-immolation. What they did vaunt and 
display was the bleeding back and the stained 
thong, and this not alone to men, but also to 
God, that ostensibly He might witness their 



Carl Wian's flagellants. 117 

frenzy and flaming zeal, and grant them 
deliverance as individual and nation, in 
view thereof. We can but think of the an- 
cient trial between Elijah and the priests of 
Baal, who immolated themselves and called 
loudly upon their god, amid the taunts of the 
prophet. It is an exemplification of the 
heathen way, which considers the gods ap- 
peasable by the sacrifices which a man's 
hands may make. It is the spirit of all 
ritualism, which places appeasement in the 
hands of a priesthood, or rests it upon some 
act of devotion. Jesus Christ has said, " If ye 
love me, keep my commandments ; " and the 
Christian church sayeth, "Do penance, at- 
tend regularly upon worship, profit by the 
institutions of religion," while she too often 
forgetteth to add, " But remember that these 
are of virtue solely as they shall be an assist- 
ance to a life of obedience to the Holy Lord 
Jesus, the shepherd and bishop of souls." 

One has recently said most truly : " Then, 
the simple supper-talk with the twelve 
friends, met in a fellowship sanctified by 
prayer and love : now, an elaborate altar, 
jeweled vestments, pealing organ, kneeling 
and awe-stricken worshipers ; then, meetings 
from house to house for prayer, Christian 



118 £Tetr> Concepts of £)lb Dogmas, 

praise and instruction in the simpler facts of 
the Master's life and the fundamental prin- 
ciples of His kingdom : now, churches with 
preachers, elders, bishops, sessions, pres- 
byteries, councils, associations, missionary 
boards ; then, a prayer breathing the com- 
mon wants of universal humanity in a few 
simple petitions : now, an elaborate ritual 
appealing to ear and eye and imagination, 
by all the accessories which art and music 
and historic association combined can con- 
fer ; then, a brotherhood in Jerusalem, with 
all things in common and a board of deacons 
to see that all were fed and none were sur- 
feited : vl to all of which we say, as did our 
fathers of old, It is not of the Lord. Back to 
Christ and His commandments, or ye cannot 
abide in His love. Down with the Flagel- 
lants ; down with Ritualism ; yea, down even 
with the church, if by it the true Christ be 
obscured, and fetiches of devotion be erected 
instead. For the only valid thing in Chris- 
tianity is love and obedience to God through 
Christ, whom He hath sent. 

1 Lyman Abbott. 



THE FACE OF CHRIST. 

" Seeing it is God that said, Light shall shine 
out of darkness , who shined in our heart 's, 
to give the light of the knowledge of the 
glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ.'' 1 
— 2 Cor. 4 : 6. 

THIS is a declaration concerning the light 
which lighteth every man who cometh 
into the world. We must agree with the 
Quaker in asserting the universality of God's 
influence upon humanity ; we must agree with 
the revelation contained in the New Testa- 
ment, which declares that the Holy Ghost 
reveals the person of Christ to the conscious- 
ness of believers, so that, illumined, they 
show forth the true nature of the person of 
the world's Redeemer. Our text is a taking 
of the part for the whole. A sample of the 
glory of God as revealed in Christ is obtained 
when we attain true apprehension of the 
character of God as revealed in the face of 
Jesus. The object of the gospel here set 
forth, which has sprung up in so great splen- 
dor of God, is to scatter its rays into all parts 
of the known world, so that men shall behold 

("9) 



120 Xicw Concepts of 2)16 Dogmas. 

the illumination of the character of God, as 
set forth best, or if you please, adumbrated 
most clearly to the limited capacity of men, 
in the person of Jesus of Nazareth, the King 
of the Jews. 

This is a remarkable scripture, because it 
implies an acceptance of the face as a measure 
of the man. The wondrous nature of the 
great Master of the art of doing good, who in 
poverty, chastity, and obedience went about 
laden with compassions for the sick and tired 
rabble of the Galilean towns, showed the 
depth of His loving-kindness man-ward in 
His face. He who in a world laden with shams 
and fettered by hypocrisies lived honestly 
and spake the truth, spoke out honestly 
from His honest eyes. The carpenters Son 
of Nazareth, prepared by long years of medi- 
tation for His mission, with the conscious- 
ness of His capacities, and filled with longing 
for the redemption of humanity, spake out 
the fullness of His heart in the very tremor 
of His silent lips. When He, who had in the 
very constitution of His personality the pledge 
of God's omnipotence, and whose life was a 
constant endeavor for the accomplishment of 
the eternal purposes of the Almighty Father, 
at length in the place of a skull, at the hands 



tC^e $ac<t of Christ. 121 

of the greatest military and commercial power 
of the earth, under instigation of the noblest 
religion the world then knew, suffering the 
pangs of death, cries out, " Father, into Thy 
hands I commend my spirit," and turns His 
face, we may see the illumination of the glory 
of God in the face of Jesus Christ. What 
wonder that Wallace, portraying this scene 
in " Ben Hur," makes Simonides, the aged 
Jew, answer Hur's, "Now cover thine eyes, 
and look not up ; but put thy trust in God, 
and the spirit of yon just Man so foully slain," 
with the reproof: "Nay, let us henceforth 
speak of him as the Christ." 

The greatest proof of blood is said to be 
the color of the skin. From the raised and 
colored sculptures of the valley of the Nile 
we learn that there has been no change in 
color on the part of the Egyptian popula- 
tion for a hundred generations ; the eyes of 
Anthony and Cleopatra looked upon the 
swarthy backs of servitors bearing the same 
hues of skin, as do the eyes of the modern 
traveler. This is a far better clue to race 
than language or customs, which are fre- 
quently imposed by conquest or changed by 
contact. The next most important witness 
to community of blood is the size and shape 



122 Hem Concepts of 2)16 Dogmas, 

of the skull. Cranial similarities are among 
the best witnesses that God perpetuates 
types and deals with men in bulk as nations 
and communities, as well as with men indi- 
vidually. In color and type Jesus was a 
Hebrew ; how much He bore the mark of 
His race, or how little its distinguishments 
distinguished Him, we do not know. He was 
doubtless Jew enough so that we should rec- 
ognize Him as such did He to-day walk our 
streets. But as men have portrayed, striving 
to bring to the canvas somewhat of the con- 
cept of the glory of God in the face of Christ, 
it has been a national face, alien to what was 
the face of the form of Jesus ; it has been a 
limited human face, it has been a face lack- 
ing the majesty and glory of God. 

Turn over, then, the noblest prints repro- 
ducing the well-nigh inspired productions of 
artistic genius, and feast thine eyes on the 
likenesses purporting to clothe anew to mod- 
ern eyes Him who is at the right hand of the 
throne of God, and close the book and rest 
thy head upon thy hands, and see if thy heart 
can accept any of these as a satisfaction of 
its ideal. I am sure the best that man's hand 
can fashion and his heart conceive cannot 
equal the glory of God as it shines within 



tT^e $act of Christ 123 

thee, the Holy Ghost being thy teacher. The 
picture is of earth : the glory of God in the 
face of Jesus Christ is of heaven. Away with 
these earthly substitutes for the unseen face 
of Christ in the heavens, away with the rude 
images of Christ on the crucifix, away with 
the wayside shrine, the forms of agony, and 
the rude clots of blood, away with the human 
Christ ; give us the face of the Son of Mary 
with the Godhead shining through it. 

Notice, first, that it is the glory of God 
in the face of humanity that is to become a 
matter of knowledge through the Holy Ghost. 
The glory of God is not best set forth by 
some great earthquake scene, some black- 
ness and darkness and tempest, but rather 
by God's glory manifest in the face of the 
Son of man. When Jesus died, the signifi- 
cance of the event and the glory of God was 
not to be found in the yawning earth, or the 
rocks rent, or the veil of the temple torn in 
twain, or the darkness, but in the face of 
Him who upon the central one of three crosses 
showed forth in His features an illumination 
of the glory of God. Say how can that be ? 
that the glory of God is not to be sought in 
earth's most glorious sunsets, in shadow of 
the mightiest mountains, or on the bosom 



124 Hem Concepts of £)lb Dogmas. 

of the most picturesque hill-locked lake, un- 
der the spray of the most gigantic waterfall, 
or amid the thunder of its leaping floods, but 
in the face of man ? The answer is because 
God is something besides power spelled with 
a large " P," because God is something more 
and something very different from a giant 
hurling hill-tops to scoop out lake basins ; 
He is something else than natural law in its 
most sublime workings. It is a God reveal- 
ing Himself through personality ; which reve- 
lation thus conditioned is certain evidence 
that He is a person, for if He were a law and 
a cosmic fact merely, men must learn of 
it by its manifestations, and religion could 
be comprised in nature, as in all atheistic 
philosophy. 

This prepares us for another consideration ; 
namely, that the face is a mirror reflecting 
the thoughts and purposes of the heart. A 
face is not a mask ; by great force of will and 
long training it has sometimes become such 
so far as the momentary thought is con- 
cerned. Such it notably was in the case of 
Mr. Disraeli, and of Napoleon the First. But 
even then the craftiness of the one and the 
brutality of the other shone through it. You 
need not be told the master motive of their 



£f?e $au of (Christ. 125 

lives, when once you have seen representa- 
tion of their strongly marked faces. Clean, 
pure thoughted high-mindedness works it- 
self out from the heart into the face. The 
glory of God was in one face, and worked 
itself out there from the heart ; there was 
perpetual benignity on one brow, perpetual 
good-will lurked in the corners of one mouth, 
perfect love as an aroma was the atmosphere 
around one personality, perennial kindness 
welling up in one heart was in the look of 
the person, and is there now and evermore. In 
other words, the human heart is made by our 
text the interpreter of the loftiest passions of 
the Godhead, and the human face is made 
their fitting and adequate exponent. 

If therefore thou wouldst know what the 
face of Jesus was like, together with the su- 
peradded glory of the majesty of God as an 
aureole incorporated in it, seek thou the illu- 
mination of the Holy Ghost. Seek thou not 
to know the exact form of those features, for 
thou couldst only have the merest outline 
without the fire of life and without the in- 
duement of glory. And as thou shalt turn 
the leaves of the familiar narrative of the 
life of Christ as told by Apostolic men, or 
shalt study the applications of the principles 



126 Hero Concepts of £)lb Dogmas. 

of Christ to the practical duties of every-day 
life as made in the Epistles, or shalt strive 
to unravel the hidden thing in the uncouth 
book of Revelation, ask the blessing of God 
that thou mayest learn aright the lesson of 
obedience, and mayest have superadded a 
better understanding of the glory of God as 
revealed in the face of Jesus Christ. And 
thou shalt grope after that likeness, but shalt 
not see it ; and everything that thy imagina- 
tion conjurest up will be found to be some 
recollection of painting or picture of Christ 
refurbished up, and thou shalt be more con- 
scious than ever of the blank that is pre- 
sented to the eye of him who would gain a 
definite idea of the appearance of the face 
of the Master. 

But pray on and enter more and more into 
fellowship with the sufferings of Jesus by the 
way of self-denial, and go out in service of 
Him, bearing thy cross with the fullest inten- 
tion, God helping, to carry that cross to the 
place of crucifixion for that motive which 
makes thy cross a possibility to thy heart. 
Enter more and more into sympathy with the 
mind of Jesus in its evident purpose to do 
good to every living being in so far as He 
had opportunity. And as thou prayest, thou 
shalt be conscious of a presence with thee, 



<0}e $acz of Christ 127 

thou shalt live under the inspiration of a 
personality. As in various acts of life thou 
shalt live in fashion presented by the attitude 
of that personality toward the problems of 
pure being, and shalt find in this and that 
scripture the relation of that wondrous per- 
son delineated with precision, there will dawn 
upon thy understanding a revealed soul 
power of exceeding largeness. In your ideal 
of that person, righteousness, honor, and truth 
shall have their place, the compassions will 
be found in all fullness in Him ; righteousness 
and mercy will be found to have kissed each 
other ; benignity and justice will be seen 
harmonious. And though the world cannot 
produce anthentic features of the Son of man 
who is the Son of God, helped of the Holy 
Ghost thou shalt be conscious of the illumina- 
tion of the glory of God, which must be in 
that face, its compassions, its loves, its hopes, 
its hates, its responsibilities, its wanness from 
cares, its sorrows so deep, its anguish of death 
so unspeakable. And thou shalt know of a 
truth that thy illumination is of God the 
Spirit, and that the glory of God which is as 
an illumination of the face of Jesus, thou hast 
knowledge of in thy heart ; thou hast His 
attributes, thou knowest the marks which 
will lead thee to His face. 



THE STRICKEN CHRIST. 

" He hath no form nor comeliness ; and when 
we shall see Hi?n, there is no beauty that 
we should desire Him. ' ' — Is a. jj : 2. 

THE Christian who has carried his faith 
beyond commonplace morality, and has 
bowed his spirit before the unique presence 
of the Son of man, cannot fail to think what 
must have been the form and mien, the face 
and expression, of the Nazarene. Other art- 
ists may paint the mythological heathen gods, 
Landseer may paint lions, Barye may fashion 
griffins or any uncouth beast unknown ex- 
cept to his own imagination, Church may 
paint landscapes, Holman Hunt faces, Watt 
portraits and allegory ; but the man who 
paints for Christendom is the man who paints 
the face of Jesus Christ. To the Christian 
believer all art is as nothing compared with 
Christian art centering in Christ ; all art 
lacking its consummate flower and being, 
as a plant that never blossoms, if it does 
not present in the highest type of its gen- 
ius adequate representation of Him who was 
(128) 



£f?e Strtcfen Christ. 129 

more than Shakespeare, for whom Bacon wrote 
his plays, because the stars presided over His 
birth, and the supernatural was in one or- 
ganism fully in touch with mundane things. 
That the problem is difficult goes without 
the saying. The abstractions of justice, 
purity, virtue, and philanthropy are in their 
nature absolute and characteristic only of 
God the Supreme ; and these not dependently 
suggested, but in union with Omnipotence 
must be co-joined and co-terminate a finitude 
which we who are men have in a narrow tene- 
ment of perishable clay, so dependent upon 
environment that the least dislocation of the 
eternal law of nature whisks us out of being 
in a second, a flight of space in which the 
winged message of modern life will leap 
underneath the oceans and connect the hemi- 
spheres. That weakness which in a second 
of time is as nothing, leaving a destroyed 
body and having a spirit translated from 
earth to Elysium, "This day shalt thou be 
with me in Paradise " illustrating the power 
of God in translation from earth to heaven in 
the same space of time in which man makes 
his greatest triumph over nature in the elec- 
tric circuit, this weakness which at best can 
only meet the wear and tear of its environ- 
9 



130 Heu> Concepts of £>lb Dogmas, 

ment, less than a hundred years out of eter- 
nity, must be united with the attributes of 
the Godhead, its repose and power, in the 
face of One on canvas to express with any 
true realism Jesus Christ to a human heart. 
Michael Angelo and Raphael must have 
known God. Munkacsy, the artist of " Christ 
before Pilate," must know God ; the artist 
of the future must know the heavenly Spirit 
and the King of kings, and must cease to 
grovel with sense and time perceptions only. 
In the ancient history of the church, three 
types, illustrating three concepts of the char- 
acter of Christ, have been left as imperish- 
able memorials of the faith of long ago. 
There is the young and fair Christ of the 
Western Church, the Christ which modern 
Christendom has succeeded to historically, 
and illustrated by the tendency of modern 
artists to portray Christ in the temple as 
do Hoffman and Holman Hunt. Then there 
is the middle-aged Christ of the Greek or 
Eastern Church, a Christ of unusual maturity 
for his years, perhaps the truest Christ be- 
cause the home Christ, that is, the Christ 
ideal affected by the local traditions which 
hung about the place of His nativity. Finally, 
there is the monkish Christ, authority for this 



<Tl?e Strtcfen Christ 131 

last conception being derived from the text 
of the morning : " He hath no form nor come- 
liness ; and when we see Him, there is no 
beauty that we should desire Him." The 
Oberammergau Christ is that of a reformer 
and somewhat of this type. The Christ 
of the great Russian painter Gay, recently 
brought to notice, is plainly to be classed 
here ; it is a well-nigh demented beggar who 
faces the hard-headed wicked Roman gov- 
ernor, Pontius Pilate. That the monk who 
lived a holy life in his cell apart from men 
should foster this ascetic, sorrowful ideal, 
and make it famous, is not strange. For 
gloomy views of life, destiny, and religion 
must needs effect such an end. Men in gen- 
eral have never been able to assent to the 
Greek canon of taste which declares that 
physical beauty and moral health are co- 
terminous in personalities. 

From Socrates to William Lloyd Garrison 
the men who in civilized nations have had 
most conscience and native moral power, have 
almost without exception been lacking in per- 
sonal beauty. The American people, whose 
Greatheart was Abraham Lincoln, and whose 
Nestor was Washington, have not come to 
regard it as essential to great moral endow- 



132 Hett) Concepts of £)16 Dogmas. 

ments. There is nothing said in the New 
Testament either way, but this we can say, 
that they who have great bitterness of soul 
struggle, and who with great purity and lofti- 
ness of purpose meet evil, show their buffetings 
in their faces, ourselves being judges. Yet 
there is nothing in a face, one way or another. 
We would commit no man to jail for his looks 
nor would we hate him unheard. The heart 
is the essential feature, and out of the heart 
the mouth speaketh. No man shall be com- 
pelled by his address to overcome our dislike, 
like the French orator who must needs in the 
first fifteen minutes dissipate by his eloquence 
the bad impression made by his ugly face. 

There is no virtue, then, in itself in beauty 
or its lack, but nevertheless the great act of 
the life of Christ is one of repulsive nature. 
All other acts are commonplace beside ; His 
death is stamped as a divinely wrought office, 
an act full of His deity and son-ship, an act 
fraught with more meaning than anything else 
He did. Every other office of His life might 
be attributed to human nature suitably en- 
dowed. This alone is devoid of significance 
if He is merely an endowed man. Did He die 
as Socrates died, an unjustly accused person, 
hounded by enemies, yet innocent, magnani- 



Cfye Strtcfen Christ 133 

mous, and calm ? or did he die as Jesus 
Christ ? Dodge it you cannot, that the su- 
premest moment of the Nazarene's earthly 
career, that calculated to give type to faith, 
that which sets the seal upon the whole trans- 
action of His life as altogether of God and not 
of man, reveals the distressed, anguish-laden 
features of one in death pangs, by cruel 
agony smitten ; it is the awful and repulsive 
face of Jesus on the cross, the Saviour of 
sinners, which is transmitted to history. 

But men are suffering all about us, and 
while we do not believe that it is punish- 
ment of necessity, we cannot tell what meas- 
ure of it may be due to violation of God's 
law in this generation or the last. This Man 
was sinless and had a sinless nature, and the 
very fact of that sinlessness makes eager the 
onlooker to know why the just must needs 
suffer. But we forget the face of Him writh- 
ing in pain ; let us remember the dead, we 
say, as we saw them in life ; let us forget all 
that lies between the glimpse we had of 
health and strength and happiness in an- 
other and better day. But Jesus Christ, by 
the miracle of His death, would keep alive 
His passion. Men might well close their eyes 
on this tragedy, and refuse to view it ; no 



134 Hero Concepts of £)lb Dogmas. 

man can peruse the account of it at the 
close of a series of readings in the Gospels 
without eyes blinded by tears which have 
arisen unbidden. 

But however much we would put from us 
thought of a bleeding, dying Christ nailed to 
a wooden cross, His dear flesh torn and bleed- 
ing, His human nature ebbing slowly away, 
His heart crying out to the Father in His un- 
utterable anguish, Christ commands against 
that oblivion ; He would be seated in our 
hearts with a presence full of suffering, un- 
comely in its anguish, a personality of sor- 
rows, acquainted with grief; and the face at 
first hidden from Him must be turned to- 
ward Him, and the averted eyes must be 
raised in faith. Is this not repulsive, this 
Jew raised upon the cross of a malefactor ? 
Yes, says the skeptic, you have a bloody, 
uncomely, hateful religion. Indeed there is 
no form, no comeliness, in the Crucified, that 
men should desire Him. He was a man of 
sorrows, acquainted with grief. 

There are three great lessons in that ter- 
rible scene. First, it is a revelation of the 
love of God. No easy-chair philosopher 
could teach this. Christ in his miracle- 
working tours about Galilee never could 



Oje Strtcfen Christ 135 

have taught it. Socrates could say, " No 
evil thing can happen to a good man." But 
it needed the death of the cross, the humilia- 
tion and anguish of it, the poor, distressed 
piece of flesh upon it, to point men to the 
love of God for sinners. Love, even, is not 
manifest by the hermit in his cell, but by the 
sufferings of torture and spoliation of death. 
Love only can be proven by the sacrifice of 
earthly circumstance and by sufferings to the 
end. Friendship never crosses the dead line 
of danger ; its mein and presence there are 
transformed ; it then is love, and not till then. 
Only because God loved, Christ suffered. But 
that love He would have us remember in all 
the repulsive agony of its circumstance to 
burn into the fiber of human hearts as with 
caustic the words, " God so loved the world 
that He gave His only begotten Son, that 
whosoever believeth on Him should not per- 
ish, but have everlasting life." Is it repul- 
sive ? It was for thee ! 

He suffered also that we might see His self- 
denial in it all. Sin and misery walked hand 
in hand through the world countless ages be- 
fore Christ came ; they were so walking then ; 
they were apart from Him ; they sat at every 
board, and were unwelcome guests, sooner or 



136 HetD Concepts of £)15 Dogmas. 

later, of every household. As the burden- 
bearer of others, it behooved Christ to suffer. 
He was sinless, but behold the Man turning 
His face toward us in the extremity of His 
anguish. Why a sufferer, save that He bore 
the load of others ? And this hateful matter 
— sin — which thus constrained the Son of 
God and shattered His peace, is thus seen to 
be an overflowing cup of wrath. It surged 
up against the foundations of the throne of 
God, and brought the Son into the swellings 
of Jordan. It broadens its curse wider than 
its natural bed, and pours its seething waters 
of destruction over the hearts of the pure 
and good around. As it made Him suffer, 
so it shall make thee suffer. As the sin of 
the world was visited upon Him, so thy 
sin is on His head, so thy sin is broader 
than thyself, and reaches out, blackening and 
injuring others. Sin has its curse for all, and 
sets its seal of sorrow upon the upturned 
brow of many an innocent person. Thou 
who brandest another, turn and behold the 
Man of Sorrows, and let the depth of His 
bearing of your penalty of sin in His own 
body on the tree be constant reminder of the 
awful attitude of the transgressor toward his 
kind. The Man without form or comeliness 



€f?e Stricfen Christ. 137 

is before thee, to be a constant reminder of 
the sinfulness of sin. Love, self-denial, and 
penalty are there, — love such as thou must 
bear to others if thou shalt have the love of 
God as a free gift ; self-denial such as thou 
must exercise in veri-similitude if His denial 
shall avail for thee ; penalty for the trans- 
gression of others the common burden of the 
good. This anguish-torn One is to meet us 
at the memorial table to-day, and by the un- 
comeliness of His face to give the seal of 
thankfulness and make strong our resolution 
against evil. 



THE APPEALING CHRIST. 

"Behold, I stand at the door and knock." — 
Rev. j : 20. 

THOUGH Christ is the Son of the eternal 
Father, yet he had not the pomp of 
an earthly king. As we take upon our lips 
these words which form our text, " Behold, 
I stand at the door and knock," notwith- 
standing the centuries of human thought in 
Christian things, in the light of which we in- 
terpret everything Jesus did, our hearts are 
awestruck, as when above the clouds we look 
down into the chasm between the mountains, 
or look up from the foothills from which they 
rise to the mighty peaks, snow-capped and 
ice-crowned, that hold their lofty heads eter- 
nally in the heavens. Every man that ever 
knew of Jesus Christ has been conscious of 
an overtopping moral sublimity in Him, of 
a spiritual excellence of character that was 
unique, and of a personality that was un- 
approachable among the sons of men. Any- 
body may give you a hundred reasons why 
you should not be a Christian, good, sober 
(138) 



Oje Appealing Christ 139 

reasons too, as you yourself admitted, each 
of which made appeal to the reason alone. 
Yet there is not a person here that has tried 
this way, so acceptable to modern intelligence 
and so in keeping with the spirit of the times, 
but what, after the reasoning was over, when 
intellectual languor was gone, and every 
argument was battled through, found himself 
more convinced than ever, and that his hun- 
dred reasons against had really been trans- 
formed into a substantial reason why he 
should open his heart to Jesus the Nazarene. 
The ordinary man does not frame a hundred 
answers, but he has his questionings, three 
or four, more or less. Let us see what some 
of these are. 

Question I : " There are no modern mira- 
cles like those which the Gospels say Christ 
wrought." We answer, What of it ? who said 
there were ? Our care is whether these once 
occurred ; according to our thinking, it is no 
matter if the page of miracles has been a 
blank from that day until this. 

Question 2 : " The Old Testament, accord- 
ing to the Higher Criticism, is not what Jesus 
thought it was ; can you believe He was 
divine?" We answer: If Christ's knowledge 
of the Old Testament were faulty, which, 



140 Hett) Concepts of £>Ib Dogmas* 

however, we do not concede, it simply shows 
in striking manner the human limitations of 
the Son of God. We may be heretics all of 
us, like ancient Eutyches of old, denounced 
by the church because in magnifying the di- 
vinity of the Son of God he forgot that He 
was also the Son of man, and that He had 
for most part the limitations of humanity. 

Question 3 : " How can the innocent bear 
the penalty of the guilty ? and how can you 
accept the Scripture doctrine that the death 
of a sinless Christ is essential to the salvation 
of sinful men ?" We answer : Sin is continu- 
ally exacting penalties of the innocent ; "the 
iniquities of the fathers are visited upon the 
children to the third and fourth generation ; " 
the fact, then, of penalty being exacted of 
innocency is nothing strange, it is the law 
of human life. When therefore, in the full- 
ness of time, the guiltless of his own free 
will accepts in the fullness of his humanity 
a measure of that penalty which is exacted 
relentlessly from innocence, I can but rejoice 
that it is so, when this assumption of pen- 
alty doth produce moral and spiritual results. 
Furthermore, I cannot see how I can save 
myself out of my sin, unless sinlessness shall 
be in some way yoked to my redemption. 



tCfye Appealing Christ 141 

We might continue answering these ques- 
tions further, giving a sermon in a sentence, 
but these suffice to illustrate how it is that 
the Christian church, answering as reason- 
able men the leading questions that are put, 
gains strength in conviction that the duty lies 
heavy upon every person to open his heart to 
the knock of the living Christ. 

It is undoubtedly true that the church's 
testimony is discounted by the world out- 
side ; they say, " You believe, and we expect 
you to override in your special pleading any 
seeming obstacle ; we expect you to con- 
clude your argument with a statement that 
you are sincere and that you are right ; we 
do not, however, so regard the questions 
at issue." It is to be remarked that un- 
believers have not only failed to convince 
the church, but they have failed to convince 
themselves. And while the facts of science 
have always proved a perfect arsenal out of 
which to draw weapons for faith, so*that the 
church defending its dogma in different ways 
yet maintains the same system of revealed 
truth, it is remarkable that science is never 
satisfied that it has invented the perfect argu- 
ment which is altogether irrefutable against 
that citadel of revealed truth. 



142 Hem Concepts of £)lb Dogmas. 

Dissentient philosophy has gone back to 
pre-Platonic forms of atheistical belief, and 
done nothing more serious than lie about the 
age of its error by affirming that materialism 
was new ; or back to neo-Platonism, making 
all religions a development from which the 
science of religion was to be deduced, declar- 
ing all miracles of the orient on a par with 
the miraculous in Christianity, and denying 
the reliability of the authentic memoirs we 
call the Gospels ; or in Positivism has gone 
back to earliest phase of irreligion, declaring 
the phenomena discovered by the senses to 
be all there is in the universe ; or panthe- 
istically with Fichte, Schlegel, Hegel, has 
made God in one way or another this time 
vesture of the eternal we call the universe ; 
or at last, as culmination of all its thought 
dissatisfied with its own tergiversations, con- 
fessing by the act its own impotence, in 
Agnosticism has declared of all these things 
there is nothing beyond cavil, we do not 
know what to believe. In other words, un- 
believing thinking in England, Europe, and 
America is self-stultified from an intellectual 
standpoint, and proclaims mental imbecility 
in the very sphere of reason to which it 
has made appeal. It turns to the church, 



Cfye Appealing (Efyrtst. 143 

and saith, " You, however, cannot convince 
me." To this we reply, Very likely we 
cannot, but we have convinced ourselves, 
and maintain the substance of our dogma in 
marked contrast with your transformations. 
We can present a long list of Christian think- 
ers of the highest intellectual endowment and 
the fullest achievement, who have found in 
Christian believing intellectual and moral sat- 
isfaction. 

I will cite a few typical names. There 
is Faraday, the great master in physics, 
and chemistry, at whose shrine last year 
English science burned fresh incense as to 
the memory of a wizard of repute on the 
occasion of the centenary of his birth ; of 
whom Lord Raleigh on that occasion said : 
" By a series of experiments he indicated all 
the phenomena of electrical induction, and 
proved the complete identity of electricity 
in the lightning with that in the Voltaic 
cell." There is the name, too, of Gladstone, 
of whom, though it may be said that his repu- 
tation has passed its zenith, it yet remains 
that in point of pure intellect it is much to 
be doubted if England has often furnished 
his equal. Another name is that of Spurgeon 
the lion-hearted, the last great organ voice 



144 Hem Concepts of £)16 Dogmas. 

of English-speaking preachers, the last great 
Puritan, and the last great saint ; the man 
who preached the same gospel at the close 
of his ministry that he did at the beginning ; 
the modern Paul, who finished his course and 
kept the faith. These are three names out 
of myriads, but each of different type ; they 
are scientist, statesman, and pietist. Each 
had diverse temperament, each was similarly 
gifted, in degree, with extraordinary talents, 
but each had Christian faith, and they all 
illustrate to what a variety of reflective pow- 
ers and personal temperament Jesus Christ 
may be the greatest good, if they but open 
their hearts to Him. Each of these men, if 
a skeptic, would have chosen a diverse form 
of skepticism ; Spurgeon had been a mate- 
rialist, Gladstone had been a Pantheist, and 
Faraday had been a Positivist. I do not 
claim that as Christians they held precisely 
the same opinions, indeed upon many points 
they differed much ; but behind all they each 
had a common Christian faith, all of which 
unity, so wonderful and so magnificent, is to 
be traced to the fact that a knocking Christ 
did have open hearts in three consenting 
minds. We present them as types of faith, 
as witnesses of the reasonable nature of Chris- 



Oje Appealing Christ- 145 

tian doctrine, and as proofs of the power of 
Christ in the heart. But emasculate Him as 
much as you will, cut off miracles, deny His 
divinity, defame His church, do despite to 
His grace, and put Him to an open shame, 
yet there is more left than you dreamed 
when you began. 

That is your experience and it is mine. 
It is likewise the experience of the greatest 
minds who have undertaken to loosen the 
hold of Christ upon humanity. Like Thomas 
Paine, they tell a friend to believe if he can, 
knowing well that believing is better than 
unbelief, and hath intellectual satisfaction as 
well as spiritual peace. Or like Webster they 
confess that though philosophic doubts have 
disturbed their peace, yet at length there is 
a soulful calm when to the knock of the 
Crucified there is the response of an open 
heart. Or when, having written books to 
disprove Christian faith, notwithstanding the 
fruits of their labors, they have confessed to 
the unique power of the life of Christ and 
His matchless teaching. I take but a single 
quotation from Renan's "Life of Jesus." He 
says on page 215: "Repose now in Thy 
glory, noble Founder, Thy work is finished ; 
Thy divinity is established. Fear no more to 



146 Hem Concepts of £)lb Dogmas. 

see the edifice of Thy labors fall by any fault. 
Henceforth, beyond the reach of frailty, Thou 
shalt witness, from the heights of divine 
peace, the infinite results of Thy acts. At 
the price of a few hours of suffering, which 
did not even reach Thy grand soul, Thou 
hast bought the most complete immortality. 
For thousands of years, the world will defend 
Thee. Banner of our contests, Thou shalt be 
the standard about which the hottest battle 
will be given. A thousand times more alive, 
a thousand times more beloved since Thy 
death than during Thy passage here below, 
Thou shalt become the corner-stone of hu- 
manity so entirely that to tear Thy name 
from this world would be to rend it to its 
foundations." Illustrative this of a whole 
class of thinkers and their unwilling testi- 
mony to the matchless character of the 
unique Christ. I repeat, that every man 
that knows of Him is impressed by Him, 
and that the moral grandeur of His char- 
acter is the wonderment of the ages. 

It is for such a personality that we plead to- 
day, arguing that He to whom skeptics pay 
tribute and whom Christians adore, being one 
and the same person, the agreement of these 
witnesses, the willing and the unwilling, doth 
give sure ground to the feet. We cannot be 



Cfye Appealing Christ 147 

mistaken ; the Christ is divine, and He is 
knocking at the door of the heart. He upon 
whom kings might fawn is* thy suppliant 
friend, asking you to receive Him, — is thy 
loving guest if thou wilt but have Him. 

Truly, we do not believe that intellectual 
difficulties separate between men and Christ. 
There are too many great men and too many 
bright men who are devout Christians for me 
to admit that infidelity is to be reckoned a 
sign of superior intelligence. The unbelief 
which places itself hostile to all the Christian 
religion can produce, is often an eccentricity 
cultivated for effect ; but it is my deliberate 
opinion that when atheism is honest, it is a 
sign of an abnormal character or of low in- 
telligence, which may be accurately graded 
by the extent of the unbelief. God has set 
too many witnesses of himself all about us 
for any man of bright parts to be altogether 
oblivious thereto. I believe, further, that a 
doubt that cannot be mastered, itself is a sure 
sign of indeterminate mental qualities which 
will show themselves in other departments of 
the person's experience. The man who has 
not the decisive traits of character to be the 
successful head of even a small enterprise in 
business or in shop, has not the necessary 
quality for the mastery of chance doubts, all 



148 Hem Concepts of £>l& Dogmas- 

of which are sure of solution to the patient, 
inquiring mind. I pray you not to consider 
this as abusive, it is not so intended, but only 
to bring the mind ready for a further state- 
ment in the matter before us. 

The reason why men will not receive the 
pleading Christ, is to be traced to their un- 
willingness of heart. Christ is a personality 
of abounding moral perfections, and He makes 
claim upon us of a moral sort. In ordinary 
experience it is to be doubted whether any 
person fails of thus apprehending Him. With 
all consciousness of His uniqueness and the 
plain duty of submitting mind and heart to 
His law, eschewing what He forbids, hating 
what He hates, knowing our duty in the 
domain of morals, I fear that we deliber- 
ately deny the knock of the appealing Christ. 
This pulpit, then, takes up daily the mission 
of preaching the divine call to salvation with 
the distinct conviction that the reason why 
men do not yield is not due to intellectual 
doubts which they cannot remove, but be- 
cause of an unwillingness they will not mas- 
ter. If this is true, each one of us out of 
Christ is under a stupendous obligation. 

I will ask you to answer this for your- 
selves. Can you give a truthful reason for 



<Oje Appealing Christ. 149 

not opening the heart to Jesus, Saviour of 
men ? There is a white-throated song spar- 
row, not the most beautiful singer of the 
sparrow family, but still ranking high as a 
songster, that has this peculiarity, — he sings 
by day or by night ; this is the fellow who 
pipes so bewitchingly from the syringa bushes 
near your bedroom window at night. He 
sings because song is in his heart, and so I 
fancy it is in the output which we make. It 
is no use to simulate it ; but when our hearts 
are full, the utterances of our faith and trust 
are as sweet to the ear of Christ as a bird 
song at night. If we can but open heart to 
Christ, we shall have full heart toward Christ. 
With an open heart to-day we shall have full 
heart to-morrow. There is longing, then love ; 
want, then fullness ; reception, then commun- 
ion ; dearth, then joy ; fellowship, then affec- 
tion. I do not know how to appeal to you, 
but then it is not I but Christ that pleads, and 
I will let Him plead for that new life. I would 
plead for Him if it would do any good. If 
I repeat His words, may not He plead in the 
voice that articulates His words ? May I not 
speak : " Behold I stand at the door and 
knock"? Do you hear Him? 



THE MEAT WHICH IS PERISHING. 

" Work not for the food which is perishing, but 
for the meat which remaineth unto eternal 
life:'— John 6 : 27. 

THE day preceding our text, Christ had 
wrought the miracle of Feeding the Five 
Thousand. The crowd then provided for 
had followed Him to Capernaum, His home 
city, in expectation of still further miraculous 
provision for their need. Jesus rebuked them, 
answering their question, " When did you 
come here?" with the words, " Ye seek Me 
not because of the signs of My Messiahship, 
but because ye ate of the loaves and were 
filled. " There is no side reference to the 
Last Supper, for that is apart from the 
lessons of the hour, and its bread, typical of 
His availing death for believers, was not 
meant for the multitude. He bluntly told 
them He had brought no conquest of bod- 
ily necessities, so that, sustained by heavenly 
food, they might hope as lazy vagabonds 
to be sustained in His train #s He went 
about Palestine on His journeys as a vil- 
lage preacher. They desired a perishable 
(150) 



Oje Ztteat vofydi is perishing* 151 

food that they might be fed, as were their 
fathers of old, in the forty years of wander- 
ing when the manna was shed down from 
heaven ; He offers them a food which should 
abide eternally. Like everything else, this 
imperishable bread of Christ may be best 
defined by what it is not. 

I. That thing which leads us to turn aside 
from idleness is nourishment to the inner 
life. The prostrate aborigine sleeping in the 
sun in the afternoon until at the golden 
twilight of the tropics he stretches himself 
and lounges to the tree where without effort 
he gathers banana or other fruit to meet his 
trifling wants, is in a Utopia of the Chauta- 
briand or St. Pierre type ; but while he has 
the earthly bread to satisfy the alternative of 
hunger, he lacks altogether that heavenly 
bread which the soul craves. The same is 
true of the idler in civilization ; distraught 
by a well-deserved poverty, knowing hunger, 
now gorging himself with both food and 
stimulants, and in a position where, notwith- 
standing his temporal necessities, we might 
suppose that a person so constituted could 
find in the golden web of his fancy's dream 
an inner life compensatory for his hampering 
environment, we as matter of fact find him 



152 Xitw Concepts of 2)16 £)ogmas. 

most stolid of all men, and lacking those 
thoughts transcendent which are the sure 
proof of a heavenly birthright. 

The man in a state of nature hath earthly 
food, and is altogether the normal man, with 
his earth stains upon him ; but he is the 
poorest off possible to conceive, because he 
hath not the abnormal gift of succor, nourish- 
ment, and upbuilding which God alone can " 
give. Taking, then, the savage of heathen or 
Christian lands, we have a type of life which 
we do not value, but which has a certain full- 
ness of the unrestrained, unhampered sort of 
existence, and which wields an indissoluble 
charm upon that savage, whether on the 
plains or in the slums of our great cities, so 
that transformation is slow and doubtful, — a 
charm which even fascinates some white men 
who give up civilization and live with red men 
in America, or with black men in Africa as 
did Emin Pasha. 

Occupation, therefore, which dissipates 
idleness is the first form of bread from 
heaven which God grants to men. What is 
it that makes a man ? Not the power of 
assimilating food, not the capacity to walk 
erect, but instead the power of self-control, 
the capacity to use tools, and his magnificent 



Cfye 2Tteat wfyd} is Perishing* 153 

endowments of thought. When, therefore, 
in matter of idleness he approximates the 
animals, in so far he is of the earth, earthy. 
II. Whenever we turn aside from amuse- 
ment for the sake of achieving or for the 
nobler things of life, we turn from earthly- 
food to heavenly nourishment. On the 
question of amusements, notwithstanding 
the temper of this time in which we live, 
weighted with schemes for amusement so 
numerous and diversified that the votaries 
of pleasure are the hardest-worked people 
in the community, I dare affirm that the 
Puritans were right contra mundutn. The 
contention is not that there should be no 
amusements, but rather that being amused 
should be only incidental to the solid busi- 
ness of living. The amused life is the lost 
life ; it is eaten up as regularly as men eat 
rations. I would rather live the sober, 
somber life of the solemn-visaged Puritan, 
barren and plain, angular and unlovely, with 
its simple faith in God, but ennobled by 
something earnest to do, consecrating many 
humble homes, as it did fifty years ago, than 
be a member of a modern fashionable, frisky 
set, with its whirl of giddiness, its pursuit of 
new sensations, its abject adoration of sham 



154 Hem Concepts of £)lb Dogmas, 

wealth, and its corruptions, every now and 
then exposed to the world by some fresh 
scandal, for its meat perisheth, and it hath 
not that which abideth. 

The true life is that which is filled full 
with the earnest pursuit of its calling, with 
the affections of the family, a love for cult- 
ure and aesthetics, and a steadfastness of 
deepest loyalty for truth and honor. You 
may put in some pleasures, but they shall 
vanish as the deeper questions and the full- 
est passions of the life are evolved. A noble 
life is a tidal wave, coming in to shore 
freighted from God's deep which is full from 
the eternities ; the winds may wrinkle its 
surface under its curling lip of foam, but the 
flood tide of its passion for humanity or for 
God shall sweep away barriers, flood the 
creeks, watering the grass roots on the 
marshes, fill the tide-dams, closing the gates 
behind it, and thus, turning a hundred wheels 
of interest and use to others, shall pass on 
to the dark recesses of the seas beyond. 

III. When we turn from mere attention to 
the body, its food, its drink, its dress, to the 
deeper concerns of eternity, and train the 
imagination to religious themes, we turn 
from the vexed day-dream of a heckled soul 



Cfye VTttat tr>^td? is perishing. 155 

to the sureties of life and light which fill the 
temples beyond the skies. These nutritions 
that avail to-day thou mayst provide for, but 
they shall fail some day ; those looks of 
beauty shall fade ; the most beautiful gar- 
ments shall become moth-eaten. Thou art 
maintaining a temple of folly ; thy firm 
comfort is unprovided for ; thy peace is 
insecure. Thy alternations of hunger and 
thirst must be met, but they are only the 
fuel that feeds the flame of life. Is life to 
consist merely in the essentials of its main- 
tenance ? Is a person to say, I merely 
existed, I fed, I drank, I clothed ? Hear 
me : there is a bread of God which Christ 
declared hath in it eternal potencies. 

IV. When we turn our lives from degrad- 
ing ends, and give to motives of goodness 
supremer place in the heart, then we turn 
from the transitory to the imperishable. 
These degrading ends, too, are to be con- 
demned, not so much in quality as in degree ; 
they are the absolute absorption of the indi- 
vidual in money getting, or in chasing the 
bubble ambition, or absolute devotion to toil. 
Money is a most tremendous need, and can- 
not be despised without loss of a serious sort 
to the individual ; but money shall perish like 



156 Heu> Concepts of £)16 Dogmas 

all else purely earthly ; it cannot endure the 
final conflagration of things. Indeed, gold, 
so valued, is more perishable than iron, 
which is so unvalued. Gold, worth approxi- 
mately $250 per pound Troy, the symbol 
of the world's wealth, luxury, and pride, will 
melt at one fourth the temperature of iron, 
worth one cent a pound, the symbol of the 
world's uses and necessities. And yet what 
is the odds ? They are only parts of that 
handiwork of God we call the universe, the 
work of His fingers, which His hands shall 
destroy. That money getting which ends in 
miserliness is surely blind, for it leaves be- 
hind the object of its love, and cannot reach 
to the stars from whence cometh its help. 
Ambition itself is an over-reaching of self, 
for the object of self-love is in the interests of 
the individual ; and as life draws to a close, 
the soul is more and more conscious that 
having done all it can for itself there is much 
which it cannot do. It has labored and suf- 
fered to achieve, but a limit is put even to 
its own achievement. Some deep principles 
are needed for anchorage now, when the 
storms are bursting upon them. What I am, 
is lost sight of in view of, Whither shall I be 
swept ? Whatever I am, I am but one of 



£f?e JTTeat vofyid} is Perishing. 157 

myriads of souls dropping out of sight as 
multitudes passing a crowded thoroughfare 
over a broken bridge are pushed one by one 
into the cruel waters and are drowned in the 
tide. 

Men, too, may follow toil to their disad- 
vantage, and in the noble self-restraints 
which toil imposes may find a fettering of 
their nobler self. To do one thing for ten 
hours, such as making screw eyes or the slat 
of a blind, and follow it twenty years, unless 
something shall come in to arouse the inner 
man, will occasion an intellectual torpor 
injurious to the soul. It is said to be im- 
pressive for an American to go into the 
poorer districts in London and meet the 
people, for he sees before him for the first 
time in his life Anglo-Saxon poverty, all the 
markings on face and form showing the 
familiar features of many a prosperous man 
whom he has known as gifted and successful. 
Twenty generations of toilers burdened by 
their tasks of unrelieved monotony, under- 
taken in ignorance and transmitted through 
twenty generations of toilers, have produced 
results appalling to the man of the same 
blood, who has been redeemed by perilous 
enterprise duly undertaken, making a new 



158 Hero Concepts of £>16 Dogmas. 

man by creating new impulses, new activi- 
ties, and a diversified experience, succeeded, 
perchance, by a life which, though seemingly 
one of monotony in the later generation, is 
after all redeemed by the independence and 
native restlessness of the man's spirit. Toil 
is honorable, and the man who labors not is 
to be despised, but itself, carried to undue 
extreme, may be a positive curse to the 
toiler. 

This is said with the hope of breeding dis- 
content in thoughtful minds, in order that we 
may realize the poverty of this life in and of 
itself. Life in this present environment in 
its own concerns and in its own aims, is not 
worthy man's attention. We have criticised 
the life of the world age, not cynically, but 
because we have something better than this 
world knoweth. I desire to make plain this 
higher life, whose transcendence Christ de- 
clared when He said it was the bread which 
remaineth unto the eternities. It is due first 
to the teaching we draw from nature, that 
personal impression which a being obtains 
from flower, grass, tree, and shrub, from stick 
and stone, water and air, which the most 
barbarous savage as well as the most pam- 
pered child of civilization perceives to testify 



£fye UTeat tpfytd? is perishing* 159 

of an unknown God. This first impression is 
re-inforced by the impulse which every heart 
feels when looking abroad on nature and tak- 
ing in vast reaches of land or water ; the land- 
scape itself reacts upon the human heart, 
much as that same landscape does upon the 
collodion film of the photographer, and the 
prepared heart, like the prepared plate, bears 
evermore impress of what the Lord has 
wrought. Conviction and impulse are thus 
drawn from nature, that men may be re- 
deemed from the accursed dominion of that 
low type of natural life which is simply on a 
level with that of the brutes. 

But do not be deceived : these impressions 
from nature are not communicated by nat- 
ure. Two pebbles are lying together on the 
shore ; has one an impression on the other ? 
are they acquainted ? and do they talk ? Are 
two trees gifted with self-consciousness, or 
two pieces of joist, or two lakes, or two 
mountains ? This much is certain, he who 
interprets the language of the babbling 
brook and the response of the sobbing wave 
on the shore, has a mightier task than that 
professor who is in Central Africa learning 
the language of the chimpanzees. And even 
if the wind blowing among the tree- tops is 



160 Heu> Concepts of £)lb Dogmas. 

language as well as the voice of the waters, 
a strange paralysis accompanies all other 
acts of volition. If the rocks can speak to 
each other, they cannot speak without the 
intervention of some other forces than they 
possess in common ; also to me as possessing 
a material body the material thing can have 
no witness. Now we maintain this, that the 
deriving of intellectual impressions, without 
which there is no possible conception of 
the spiritual life, can be explained only on 
the inference that the material nature of the 
one has impact on the spiritual nature of the 
other through act of God. 

These impressions of the senses thus im- 
pacted upon the spiritual nature of man, in 
the heart of a child, filling the soul with the 
tremulousness which accompanies those first 
testimonies of nature to the senses, are the 
ringing of the joy bells of the heart over the 
discovery of the new continent of man-soul ; 
all of which has been accomplished by the 
direct intervention of God. What wonder 
that as the man grows older, when he re- 
ceives still stronger impressions from the 
landscape, so conscious is he of the divine 
beauty of the earth that he exclaims, Lord, 
" Thou art here/' and nothing can suit the full- 



Cfye ZTttat tpfytcfy is Perishing. 161 

ness of the heart save the Te Deum Laudamus , 
The second gift of the eternal bread is in 
the power of abstraction and thought, by 
which we forget that we are animal, and be- 
come the creatures under the stars and part 
of the immensities of God. All scientific 
knowledge, all conception of truth, all ar- 
tistic creations of brush or pen or voice, are 
through God The tympanum of the tele- 
phone at the ear of the receiver is perfect, 
but to transmit its message there must be a 
similar tympanum to respond to the human 
voice at the other end of the wire. Granted 
a perfect receiver, it is still a useless instru- 
ment without a transmitter. The air may be 
full of sounds out there, but you are passive, 
being unmoved by its rapture. So the ma- 
terial world hath no corresponding instru- 
ment to the human heart ; and that soul must 
be unmoved by long-distance messages, until 
at the other end of sense perception a trans- 
mitter of similar characteristics shall speak 
into the soul the gracious messages of the 
divine impressions. Why is it that a song 
gives inspiration, except it be that the wave 
motions started by the volition of the singer 
reproduce upon us those impressions with 
which it was freighted ? How then can inani- 
ii 



162 Hem Concepts of £>lb Dogmas. 

mate nature answer back from its dead clods 
and give me the impressions of a living be- 
ing? We answer, It cannot, except God 
interposes, who is the Author, though the 
Holy Ghost, of this eternal bread of life 
differentiating the genus homo from all the 
creation. This is the second step in the 
redemption of man from subservience to 
the flesh. 

Of this bread of heaven Christ was the 
consummator. That primeval revelation to 
man of God in nature, and God behind nat- 
ure, He quadrupled a hundred times over. 
Monotheism outside of Judea was a starving 
remnant, having lost its own ideals with 
which it started, and not able intelligently 
to make affidavit as to its own birthright. 
Henceforth all is secure ; Christian men can 
to-day as well deny their self-consciousness 
as their God-consciousness ; we are as sure 
that He lives as that we live. 

How much the incarnation of the divine 
wisdom in the person of the Nazarene has 
deepened human knowledge, let the intelli- 
gence of Christendom as opposed to the 
ignorance and superstition of heathenism 
give good and sufficient answer. It may 
be truly affirmed that notwithstanding the 



£fye VTttat tD^td} is perishing, 163 

genius of Greek and Roman times, all knowl- 
edge, philosophy, and government in any- 
Christian epoch doth vastly outweigh it. 
This much is certain, for twenty centuries 
the dialectics of this world have not been 
able to overcome the foolishness of preach- 
ing, and I doubt if it ever will. The seeth- 
ing life of the ancient Roman world could 
not forget Him ; the Roman power could 
put Him to death, but could not end His 
influence. He lives through the ages in spite 
of the generations of men. He brought food 
that should remain. But in no sphere did 
He complement all that men knew so much 
as in the moral and spiritual life. Duty 
henceforth became plain to men. Self-denial 
was established as a component part in all 
goodness. Love became the leverage for 
moving men to righteousness. The incarna- 
tion was the re-beginning of a holiness which 
had fled a sin-cursed earth. To the perfect- 
ness of our ideal we unceasingly turn, and in 
His life find light, for the life was the light 
of men. 



THE PATIENT DOTH MINISTER TO 
HIMSELF. 

" For God sent not the Son into the world to 
condemn the world; but that the world 
should be saved through Him." — John 

3 ' *7> 

THERE is something in us that will not 
down, our acts being under the control 
of the will, and each able to do the most 
red-handed crime ; yet God has placed his 
daggers in the soul, as though some avenger 
were present with our secret self to bring a 
fiery and terrible vengeance upon the trans- 
gressor. Wordsworth, in one of his early 
poems, cites such a character : — 

" He met a traveler, robbed him, shed his blood; 
And when the miserable work was done, 
He fled, a vagrant since, the murderer's fate to 
shun. 

14 From that day forth no place to him could be 
So lonely, but that thence might come a pang, 
Brought from without to inward misery." 

Scientific descriptions of conscience fill the 
books, most of them in a high degree unsatis- 
(164) 



£f?e patient botfy Xtttmster to ^tmself. 165 

factory ; but we do not need definitions ; we all 
know the power of conscience as a disturb- 
ing element in unrighteous calculations, in 
thwarting us of the fruits of illegitimate vic- 
tory by having the apples of gold turn to 
ashes within our grasp. Criminals long es- 
caped from justice give themselves up after 
years of successful hiding. Like Lady Mac- 
beth, it preys upon their minds as they 
sleep ; the stained hand is ever before their 
eyes, and " all the perfumes of Arabia will 
not sweeten it." "What, will these hands 
ne'er be clean ? " 

The heart of a child beats 140 times per 
minute, at the close of a year its stroke is 
120, past middle life it is sixty or seventy 
beats. Napoleon and his conqueror, the 
Duke of Wellington, had only forty heart- 
beats a minute. May that not signify how 
those men could take enormous risks and 
carry them to the end ? how the one, Na- 
poleon, could face the allied armies of Eu- 
rope, after his exile to Elba, and make one 
more appeal to destiny on the field of 
Waterloo ? and Wellington for nine mortal 
hours hold his line of battle firm until his 
military instinct divined unerringly that the 
time for a general onset of the whole front 



166 Hem Concepts of £>lb Dogmas, 

had come ? For what is it that unnerves 
men but a heart pumping with violence, 
whitening the cheek and deranging the 
powers of the will ? 

Men wear out nowadays from nervous pros- 
tration, but that is generally due to heart 
failure, because of the reflex action of mental 
strain upon the source of life. Worry, trouble, 
and the nervous push of things necessary for 
successful life, the excitements of our poli- 
tics, the curse of the daily newspaper, with 
its appeals to our sympathies and hates, wear- 
ing us out with other people's concerns, the 
multitudinous amount of brain-work which a 
man can do through the telegraph and rapid 
means of transit, the enormous pressure of 
modern competition, making the waves of 
the commercial ocean with its tides of busi- 
ness, seem like the heaving waves of the 
ocean in storm, — all rest upon the physical 
constitution, and strike deepest at the heart. 
It flutters like a wounded bird's wing beating 
the unwilling air, or like a canary when you 
have your hand upon the cage, at some sud- 
den fear. A thousand hearts with sympathy 
are throbbing when some life-saving act is 
performed under our eyes, perhaps a strong 
man swoons when the deed is done. And 



Oje patient botfj minister to fjimself, 167 

thus the mind acts on the physical constitu- 
tion ; the capacity for thought is in involun- 
tary connection with the engine which drives 
the wheels of our life ; he therefore that is a 
fugitive from the divine justice, lives faster, 
wears out sooner, and the joylessness of the 
life is heightened, by the drag of a decreased 
physical energy. This gives significance to 
the cry of the Psalmist, " My heart and my 
flesh rejoice in the living God," for David had 
committed criminal sin, and knew the depres- 
sion of sin upon the body ; not only was his 
soul freed from burden, but the vital energy 
which we identify with the heart, the seat of 
the principle of life, was freed and blest in 
the great congregation. Thus doth God 
daily witness in the human being, giving the 
lie to the shameless asseveration of the street, 
namely, that the human body knows no con- 
science. 

What mean the nervous twitches of the 
criminal under the surveillance of the eye of 
suspicion ? What means the dethronement of 
reason under the pressure of a great crime, 
or when man is ready to give up his life of 
the body, because it is as naught compared 
with the shame of existence? I knew a boy 
once that took his life under just such cir- 



168 Xitw Concepts of £)R> Dogmas. 

cumstances. A judge has been known to 
leave the bench and place himself at the side 
of a prisoner at the bar convicted of murder, 
and confess to a similar crime thirty years 
before, so much heavier seemed the burden 
of a wicked conscience than the loss of phys- 
ical life, the enjoyment of which is the highest 
boon the body can confer upon the spirit. 

Says Macbeth. — 

44 How does your patient, doctor ? " 
Doctor. — 

" Not so sick, my lord, 
As she is troubled with thick-coming fancies, 
That keep her from her rest." 
Macbeth. — 

" Cure her of that. 
Canst thou not minister to a mind diseased, 
Pluck from the memory a rooted sorrow, 
Raze out the written troubles of the brain, 
And with some sweet oblivious antidote 
Cleanse the stuffed bosom of that perilous 

stuff 
Which weighs upon the heart ?" 
Doctor. — 

4 'Therein the patient must minister to him- 
self. " 

We can say aye to that ; men know the 
power of conscience, but every man has his 



0?e patient botf) Minister to ^tmself- 169 

own medicine. Often circumstances do alter 
cases, and he imagines great peril or fears 
great turgid imaginations which never could 
amount to much. I will only enumerate a 
few general instances. 

A very common excuse which is used as a 
sedative in our daily life for a troubled con- 
science is the plea : Somebody will sell 
liquor if I do not ; somebody will cheat the 
government if I do not ; somebody will op- 
press the poor if I do not. Another very 
common one is this : Everybody lies, every- 
body steals, everybody compromises with 
duty, everybody is a hyprocrite, particularly 
the minister and church-members ; therefore 
I am just like the rest. It is strange each 
person does not see that to his own Master 
he standeth or falleth, and that no excuse for 
wrong-doing can be found in the misdeeds of 
other people. But this is the medicine which 
many a patient ministers to himself. 

Now we have cited two classes of experi- 
ence, the worst of men and the best of men. 
But we have not placed the worst of men on 
a par with the best. While the worst suffer 
more or less the pangs of conscience, and 
particular men suffer extremely, we think 
it is true that the best people suffer more 



170 Hem Concepts of £)lb Dogmas, 

for small transgressions. We have striven to 
show a well-nigh universal characteristic of 
human experience, but the fact remains that 
those who live most uprightly suffer rela- 
tively most keenly for their derelictions. A 
person believing profanity wrong is shocked 
beyond measure if by any sudden thought- 
lessness he utters an oath. A person who 
scorns a liar is very much ashamed of a de- 
ceit, or even of whatmust appear a deceit in the 
eyes of his neighbor. This is not strange, 
the competent workman is he who feels most 
the ill-made joint, or the ugly gouge made by 
his chisel. The dabster thinks it can be made 
right by putty and paint. They who take 
pains in morals and religion know best the 
blemishes of an upright character, they trace 
disproportionately their moral oversights and 
their unintentional sins ; but I am direct- 
ing to the thought that the best and the 
worst have consciousness of dereliction, and 
that God has set up a chamber in the soul 
like that sealer's apartments at Washington, 
full of accurate standards of moral measures, 
so that when we reel off yard after yard ac- 
cording to our measure, we are somehow con- 
scious that we have not given God's measure, 
and having the facilities at hand, may set our 
measure right if we will. This gives the de- 



Cf?e Patient botfy ZTTtmster to ^tmself. 171 

gree of human responsibility. We can do 
better if we will, be juster, be truer, be more 
devout. For therein the patient doth minis- 
ter to himself. 

The Indian mother of old threw her child 
into the Ganges to expiate the sin of her 
soul, " for therein the patient must minister 
to himself. " Read the article in the March 
number of the Century (1890) on the " Sun 
Dance of the Sioux Indians," and note how on 
the fourth day the young warriors presented 
their bared breasts to the knife of the medi- 
cine man, that on each side, near the shoul- 
der, the skin might be stripped up, and a 
bone skewer firmly attached to a thong sus- 
pended from the pole in the center, be sewn 
in on either side, that dashing themselves 
backward two or three hours, or perchance 
until the skewer had torn out, they might 
win the favor of the sun god ; the writer 
does not say expiation, but I am confident 
that their self-torture means more than 
adoration of the omnipotent power of the 
sun ; it is simply their way of atonement ; 
for therein the patient doth minister to 
himself. 

But, says some one, how about your Chris- 
tianity ? does it not, heathen fashion, provide 
some method of redemption adapted to the 



172 Tttvo Concepts of £)lb Dogmas. 

vagaries of the different sets of people whom 
it incloses ? I answer, Yes. Boyesen says of 
Ibsen : " Christianity has, in his opinion, been 
vulgarized by its adaptation to average, com- 
mon-place men, and its demand of absolute 
purity, uprightness, and saintliness has been 
compromised at thirty or fifty per cent, ac- 
cording to the ability of imperfect human 
nature ;" which is altogether true ; for therein 
the patient hath ministered to himself. We 
need less of feeling and more of Christ. 

Having consciousness, as all do have in 
some measure, of condemnation before the 
bar of our own hearts, the question arises as 
to what medicine shall be given ; "for therein 
the patient must minister to himself." We 
may do as many are doing about us, — satisfy 
the conscience by specious excuses, blunt it 
by neglect and carelessness, stupify it by 
intoxicants or narcotics, each man going by 
himself, even as the heathen have and the 
heathen do. Is it not best to find another 
will standing above nature ? To find a law 
for the will ; which shall lead men to a medi- 
cine which they cannot apply each for him- 
self, nor one for the other ; which shall be 
revealed by personality adequate and holy ; 
and which shall gather all unto Himself, not 



£fye patient botf? minister to tymself. 173 

through any base motive of purchase, but 
through mercy and favor, so that our redemp- 
tion is all of good will, and our moral healing 
the adequate cause of our salvation ? " For 
God sent not the Son into the world to con- 
demn the world, but that the world should 
be saved through Him." 



LONESOMENESS FOR GOD. 

* ' Having no hope, and without God in the 
world" — Eph. 2: 12. 

MAN is a gregarious animal. The wild 
horses of the plains are no surer to roam 
in herds than he to seek converse with his 
kind. When apart from men, he longs for 
their company, their friendship, their amity. 
When for crimes they hunt him into desert 
places, and he fears for his life, danger can- 
not prevent him from seeking the haunts of 
men ; he bares his breast to the bullets 
of the sheriff's posse, or to the knife-thrust 
of his enemy coming unawares, rather than 
endure the low spirits fostered by a life of 
exile in the solitudes ; and the oppressive 
nature of his loneliness drives him to saloon 
counters in the nearest scantling city. That 
depression of spirits known as homesickness 
is really lonesome sickness. There is nobody 
about us whom we know in such a case ; 
humanity in each personality seems like a 
huge dry-goods box ; we know nothing of 
the silks and satins inside. It is a mere 
(i74) 



Conesomeness for (gob, 175 

casing of soft-fibered, rough material ; the 
soul grows lonesome in its environment. 
There are about plenty of men, but not men 
as we have known them heretofore. The 
doors of our hearts have been open to our 
friends ; they have been to us a delight, but 
behold, the delight is gone ; they may not be 
fifty miles from us, but inexperienced and 
accustomed to the sunshine of human favor 
in the circle in which we move, we are 
clouded, perplexed, saddened, disheartened. 
Men are not merely discomforted by this 
lonesome sickness through days of weeping 
and mock despair, — mock despair, I say, — 
because of the teasing of their fellows, which 
nettles them and makes very real the fact 
of which they have been cognizant all the 
way through, namely, that there was noth- 
ing to despair about, — but it happens in 
rare instances that men die of this same 
homesickness, the body being in such sym- 
pathy with the heart in its unfathomable 
longings after the touch of life in its essence, 
impacting its own life in the very seat of 
being, that is, the soul. My horse pounds 
heavily all night long in his stall for months, 
in his frantic longing for his harness-mate 
with whom he has been in one stable or an- 



176 Xizvo Concepts of £)16 Dogmas. 

other, in Canada or New Hampshire, from 
colt-hood ; my dog mourns the absence of 
his master ; my heart pounds away with 
seemingly trip-hammer heaviness, when as a 
boy in my teens just away from home, new 
school faces cannot replace or solace me for 
the every-day faces of home and village. 
Every created thing with affections empha- 
sizes the difference between mere automatic 
life, as in the tree trunk, and the sentient life 
of a creature that can love the presence and 
being of another creature like itself. I might 
have been made unconscious of my neighbor, 
even as one stone is indifferent to every 
other, one grain of sea-shore sand to every 
other, which, heaped about it, covers it from 
the light of day, and have cared no more for 
sunshine than for darkness, but I was not so 
made ; down among other motives I recognize 
this one, which never argues out the logic of 
its position or the logic of events, but pulls 
away at heart leading-strings, demonstrating 
its presence by the reach of its cordlets deep 
into the heart of a man. 

A hermit sometimes builds his shanty in a 
neglected, barren place ; his unkempt person 
and his life apart are both good witnesses 
that he is not quite himself. Such men are 



Conesomeness for (Bob* 177 

unbalanced by the desire of human love un- 
attained ; one person denies them, they can- 
not transfer their regard to another ; denied 
the highest human relationship with natures 
too inflexibly true to turn about, they deny 
all human society because the highest and 
purest and best relation to their kind is not 
theirs. The lonesomeness of the heart over- 
spreads the intellect ; the feelings dominate 
the will, or rather swamp the personality, 
warping it ; the sentiments bleed to death 
through the one wound ; one grievous hurt 
of lonesome's poisoned arrow has spread a 
benumbing influence over those spiritual 
qualities of the inner man, so that he lives 
no more in his social instincts, but only 
keeps open such chambers of the soul as may 
be used with darkened windows, shutting 
the outlook and the sunshine derived from 
personal contact with our kind, I fancy that 
in these cases the imagination is unduly 
aroused, and that the attention is fixed upon 
the ideal of that never-dying love ; that such 
lives are transported by visions of the pres- 
ence of their beloved, and that, wrapped in 
the contemplation of their ideal made real, 
they crowd out actual association with man- 
kind. Just as Dickens, on occasion, used 

12 



178 Ttexo Concepts of £)lb Dogmas. 

to live with the creatures of his pen, spend- 
ing his daytime with them present in the 
room, revealed to his consciousness, and 
dreaming of them at night, may be. Just as 
Dante through long years treasured the 
thought of Beatrice, who never could be his 
in this life, as she was pledged to another, 
and separated from him by the great gulf of 
high social rank ; but whom in purest way 
he loved, fostering thought of her, of whom 
he wrote after her decease, and meeting 
whom in Paradise was his chiefest antici- 
pation. 

It seems plain to the preacher that these 
hermit souls must be explained as illustrat- 
ing the power of lonesomeness to dislocate the 
proper excitements of the mind and to en- 
kindle the imagination to an improper func- 
tion among the powers of the intellect. It 
illustrates the craving of the soul for compan- 
ionship in the highest degree ; for while it 
may have relations with humanity in the 
bulk, and may delight in them, such for in- 
stance as a man feels in a great congregation, 
or mass-meeting, or mob, yet the sense of 
companionship deals first hand with specific 
instances. We want to meet A, B, and C, 
and out of these various meetings and the 



£onesomeness for (Bob, 179 

pleasures thereof comes the aggregate im- 
pression which we call pleasure of society. 
Accentuate any one acquaintance, and it be- 
comes friendship ; accentuate this, and you 
find only one friendship in reality or treas- 
ured in the imagination can help from lone- 
someness and gloom. 

Until recently the opinion has prevailed 
that under stimulants men open their hearts 
to the endearing fondness of friendship, and 
that to find the typical hail-fellow well met 
you must obtain a man with drink in him. 
This seems to be exploded ; the quickened 
pulses and swifter heart-beat are due to 
the circumstances and occasion under which 
the drink is obtained, and not to the alcohol 
itself. If you take the drinker apart, and 
give him all he desires, no such symptoms 
of careless hilarity appear. We must con- 
clude, therefore, that the social instinct is 
stronger than the stimulant, and that the 
devotee who follows his cups has mistakenly 
judged of himself, and doth not know that 
God hath put witiiin him living fountains 
of water that shall slake the thirst of friend- 
ship in a score of souls, and that it welleth 
up within him, continually satisfying him- 
self as well as others. These are primal 



180 Hem Concepts of £)16 Dogmas. 

elements of being in him who is made in the 
image and likeness of God. And if the 
created thing hath bonds demanding satisfac- 
tion, He in whose likeness it is made hath 
similar bonds, and the inclination, need, and 
desire of the one will find satisfaction in the 
personality of the other. 

We are brought face to face with the fact 
that man's longing for companionship is not 
absolutely satisfied with the best which hu- 
man love and comradeship can give us, 
but that, having all that earth can give, we 
long for all that heaven can add of friend- 
ship's joy and comfort. It is not an idle 
thing to say that God's friendship is worth 
having. Knowest thou a man who has lived 
so impiously and wickedly that he has come 
to feel that God's favor cannot be won by 
his penitence, that the heavens are brass 
above him, and God's hand clenched against 
him ? Then of a surety he is one from whom 
the friendliness of earth is stricken, on the 
withdrawal of the friendship of Heaven. If 
eternal goodness is against me, friendship 
is eternally dead to me, on earth and forever. 

Take up again, if you please, the case of 
that outlaw whose hands are red with human 
blood, shed with malice of forethought. Into 



£onesomeness for (Sob, 181 

the solitudes of the prairies he urges his 
foaming steed, conscious of God's enmity 
and man's vengeance. He stops and looks 
behind him as he reaches the crest bordering 
the bottom-lands in the broad basin drained 
by a western river, and sees, as he carelessly 
swings half round in the saddle, the sheriff 
and his men behind. He ambushes him- 
self, commanding the path leading up the 
steep, perhaps behind his kneeling horse, or 
behind convenient bowlders swung and set- 
tled there by mighty waters before men 
were on the face of the earth. He shakes 
the cartridges of his repeating rifle into 
place. Malignity hath taken possession of 
him, defiance rules his brooding heart ; 
but they lose the trail at the water, and he 
journeys toward the Bad Lands, hoping in the 
desert to find rest for a nettled spirit. They 
follow him to his retreat in the valley ; with 
keen eye he learns their number, too many 
are they for one sure rifle ; he becomes a 
fugitive. Continuous watching without re- 
laxation wears upon his strength. At length 
in the moonlight, wrapped in his blanket, 
listening to the monotonous champ, champ, 
champ, of his tethered horse as he feeds 
near, resting his head on his rifle, he goes to 



182 Hem Concepts of £)16 Dogmas. 

sleep, to awake as strong men hold him pin- 
ioned, while the cold handcuffs are snapped 
upon his wrists. It is a fact that man is 
against him ; that sheriff is humanity's cham- 
pion ; those handcuffs are humanity's fetters ; 
these are man's agencies : but that smiting 
sense of Infinite Justice, repellant and hos- 
tile because outraged and despised, whence 
comes that, more terrible than armed men 
when once the human mind has been roused 
to observe how threatening is God's attitude 
to the transgressor ? And when he comes to 
trial, this red-handed assassin will fear not 
so much the punishments of earthly law, with 
its death sentence and the drop, as he will 
the withdrawal of God's face from a soul 
which clings to Him as naturally as a child 
to his father's hand, and the being is shut up 
to himself and his own resources, to himself 
and his own solitudes, while God is with- 
drawn afar. This world is full of meaning to 
the man of God ; this life is full of despair 
to the man in the world without God. 

Our text refers to the condition of the Gen- 
tile races before the preaching of the cross, 
consequent upon the rejection of the Mes- 
siah by His own people. The Gentile na- 
tions were plunged into sin and into the de- 



£onesomeness for (Sob. 183 

spair consequent upon transgression of God's 
holy law ; the never-sleeping sentinel of con- 
science sounded his alarms ; even in their 
dreams men saw terrors because conscious 
that transgression leads to penalty and that 
the divine Power without us and within us, 
however defined, could not make His abiding- 
place with such souls. Men hungered and 
thirsted after God, hungered for His love, 
hungered for His friendliness, hungered for 
His companionship. 

The whole trend of this sermon has been 
to show that we need companionships and 
association, that we need it manward and 
Godward. Man of this world, satisfied with 
thine earthly friendships, what is that longing 
within thee, unquenched and unquenchable, 
except the cravings of a soul adapted to com- 
munion with the Most High, desiring that 
companionship fulfilled ? Believe me, that 
longing which cannot be satisfied is simply 
lonesomeness for God. Heap up thy wealth, 
magnify thy learning by long years of study, 
gratify thine ambition, lengthen out the list 
of thy friends to regimental proportions, all 
shall not avail to save thee from lonesome- 
ness for God, so long as thou closest thine 
heart to His entrance, so long as thou shut- 



184 Hem Concepts of ©16 Dogmas. 

test His love out from thy love, His life from 
thy life, His essential being from contact with 
thy being in that great act which we call 
communion with God. I read of a person 
the other day who spent a night in tears out 
of lonesomeness for God. It is needless to 
say God came and granted companionship 
and the consciousness thereof. Thou mayest 
be alone in the bright illumination of the 
ball room, as well as in the quiet of thy 
library amongst the books ; thou mayest be 
alone in this congregation, with many people 
within reach, as well as amid the trees of the 
virgin forest ; thou canst not place thyself in 
a circumstance where thou art not solitary 
within if God is apart. Turning thy face to 
the heavens, realizing thou art without Him 
in the world, how melancholy is thy loneli- 
ness ! Seek His love and His favor, and He 
shall give His presence, " before whom Cheru- 
bim and Seraphim continually do cry, Holy, 
holy, holy, Lord God Almighty," and before 
whom angels veil their faces. 



FREEDOM OF THE SONS OF GOD. 

a y er iiy^ verily -, / say to you, Every one who 
doeth sin is the slave of sin." — John 
8: 34 . 

IT is a profound comment on this passage, 
and equivalent to another form of state- 
ment of the text, which says that personal 
liberty is secured by the servitude of vices. 
The habitues of the larger vices will allow 
a good name to become as empty as yes- 
terday's wind, will sacrifice fame so that it 
shall become as naught, a reputation like 
that of the great expounder of the Constitu- 
tion, becoming eaten by the corroding rust 
of human weakness, so to remain for all 
time. Nay more, they will lay their wives 
and their children upon the altar of their 
vices and consume them there, and finally 
will face death with the courage of a hero 
but the heart of a slave. You have seen 
them go forth into the land of shadows as 
slave caravans, each one bearing his yoke, 
and disappear in the darkness of African 
forests. Well hath Christ said, " Every one 
who doeth sin is the slave of sin." 

(185) 



186 Hen? Concepts of £>lb Dogmas. 

Political liberty is another thing, but after 
all the same remark applies there as else- 
where ; there can be no secure liberty save 
by the servitude of vices. You may object 
to sumptuary laws as much as you choose ; 
but when vice shall rule, liberty shall die. 
The South American States and France are 
illustrations of this fact. They are republics 
indeed, but a republic cannot save a cor- 
rupted national life. Their sudden revolu- 
tions, each closing in terrible carnages of 
blood, are but ebullitions of a tyranny which 
is never wanting in the State, a sure sign 
of its moral and spiritual degeneracy. 

Pythagoras, the Orphic philosopher, five 
hundred years before Christ, declared, " He 
who is the bondservant of sufferings and is 
ruled by them, is unable to be free." We 
have here a particular application of Christ's 
general axiom. For sin is not merely stal- 
wart vice, but sin as defined in our text by 
Him who spake as never man spake, is also 
every besetment of human flesh which, crys- 
tallized into a habit, maketh the better nature 
its servant ; it may be gluttony at table un- 
fitting for active duties in life ; it may be the 
white lie of deceit, which habitually driveth 



^reebom of t£?e Sons of (Sob. 187 

honor into hiding and maketh truth its slave, 
or other fault. 

The English public have recently been 
following with great interest a prosecution in 
the courts. It is known as Osborne vs. Har- 
grave. The suit was brought by Mrs. Os- 
borne against Mrs. Hargrave, her cousin, for 
saying that she, Mrs. Osborne, had stolen a 
pearl and diamond brooch which belonged 
to her. The first damaging fact was that 
Mrs. Osborne knew the drawer, opened by 
a secret spring, in which the jewels of Mrs. 
Hargrave were kept. She was identified by 
the jeweler, and her own handwriting upon 
the bank note received in payment proved 
conclusively that the charge was true. 

Mrs. Osborne was a long time in hiding, but 
was finally imprisoned to await trial for per- 
jury. Witness how one sin led her in bondage 
to another. Mrs. Osborne stole the jewels ; 
she then carried them to the jeweler as her 
own, she gave a fictitious address and a fic- 
titious name, told her fiance that she was 
innocent, and he married her, notwithstand- 
ing the scandal (April 4, 1891), believing her 
word. But this was not enough ; to carry 
out the pretense and satisfy her friends she 



188 Hetp Concepts of £H6 Dogmas, 

must needs bring suit against the Hargrave 
cousin, deceive her lawyer who took the 
case, and continue to dupe her husband so 
egregiously that when he saw the signature 
upon the note, he fainted, so clear was proof 
of his wife's transgression. Indeed is he that 
doeth sin the slave of that sin. 

I started with the declaration of Pythag- 
oras, "He who is the bondservant of suffer- 
ings and is ruled by them is unable to be 
free." Bodily pain, then, to revert to this 
original statement, may be a cause of sin. 
The weight of human suffering seems heavy 
enough, and sympathetic souls will say, Let 
that stand by itself; but while the impres- 
sions of pain are transitory, departing with 
its withdrawal, yet its mastery leaves us in 
bondage, and bondage where moral results 
are affected is sin. Sudden pain may make 
us well-nigh insane, but it is our duty to bear 
it. "I cannot help swearing," says one, 
u when I am hurt." You are in bondage, 
then, to pain, which looses the tongue to 
profanity. " I cannot be happy," says an- 
other, "I suffer so much." The real ques- 
tion in such a case is whether we will be in 
servitude to pain, and allow it to destroy the 
serviceableness of our lives. Shall it lead us 



^reebom of tfye Sons of <3ob* 189 

to a fault-finding temper ? shall it drive us 
habitually to an anaesthetic on slight occa- 
sion ? shall it fill our hearts with the bitterness 
of death, and turn our faces away from God ? 

Then indeed the ministry of pain has be- 
come a slavery to sin. For the mastery of 
one's self is freedom ; and he who is mas- 
tered by the anguish of suffering, is not 
master of himself. Only for the sick is such 
slavery permissible. For all who are short 
of absolute invalidism the mastery of the 
feelings of the body is the freedom of life. 
Indeed, I have known some so to school 
themselves to the endurance of their ills and 
weaknesses of the flesh that they endured 
hardness as good soldiers of Jesus Christ unto 
the end, the discipline of health answering 
most admirably every adversity until death. 
And did not they show themselves free in- 
deed, and servants of the King? 

In the " Memorabilia" we find this matter 
discussed. Socrates asks: " Therefore who- 
ever is ruled by the pleasures of the body, 
and because of these is not able to practice 
the best things, think you this one is free ? — 
Least of all," he replied. Again Socrates 
asks, "Just as doing the best things appears 
free to thee, so to have those who are pre- 



190 ttett) Concepts of £>lb Dogmas* 

vented doing such things do you think is 
slavish ? — Altogether so/' he answered. 

I have quoted this to show the argument 
of Christ, that they who do right are free 
and they who do wrong are in bondage, is 
one which He shares for substance with 
Socrates. Granted that Socrates did not 
have the spiritual insight of Christ or His 
moral power, yet these desires of the body, 
so far as we can enter into understanding 
of the language of his time, are always con- 
trasted with the things of the spirit, that 
is, the intellectual nature. This question of 
human freedom and human slavery under 
sin, this pulpit desires to argue out this 
morning a little further. 

The Christian recognizes obligation in 
Christ's service. Paul called himself the bond- 
servant of Jesus Christ. Wherein, then, does 
its freedom lie ? We answer that it is a 
service of love and a life of conviction, in 
other words, a life of obedience. There is, 
moreover, freedom of choice toward evil, as 
between it and the good. But evil choices, 
followed, result in foregone conclusions, in 
desires unresisted after the habit has been 
formed, in aimless blundering into trans- 
gression after transgression. Wrong-doing 



^reebom of tfye Sons of ©o&. 191 

usurps the whole life and the whole man. In 
right living there is knowledge of good and 
evil. Good men refuse to choose evil, not 
because they do not know it, but because 
they spurn it. Do evil men refuse to do 
good because they know what it is, and 
being well-informed in regard to it, reject 
it as the lesser good ? What knowledge 
have the great majority of evilly disposed 
men of what is really good ? Certainly there 
are comparatively few who really know what 
it is to do good, who fall away from right- 
eous living. Our older theology held it to 
be impossible to fall from grace, and I am 
inclined to think it was right. As a matter 
of fact, the evilly disposed are never safe ; 
settled down to one order of life, you can 
never tell how soon a new influence may 
draw them away to new paths. Why do 
fathers and mothers watch with such eager- 
ness the young manhood of their sons and 
the young womanhood of their daughters, 
except they are aware a wrongly directed 
life will leave, with pleasure, another name 
for likings, at the helm, the flapping sail to 
any breeze ? 

I wish this were all that needed to be said, 
but, alas ! it is not. We have not drawn the 



192 Titw Concepts of £>lb Dogmas. 

full picture of human bondage to sin. We 
have drawn some sketch of the bondage of 
sin where sin is vice. The bondage of the 
individual conscience yet remains. It is 
remarkable that the conscience can be en- 
slaved by one's prejudices. For this rea- 
son some people can never do anything 
right because we never will grant that any- 
thing they do is right. Conscience knows 
such a course is wrong, but the sin of selfish- 
ness hath enslaved it. Then, too, there is a 
wrong moral perspective, the minor moral 
cause being unduly magnified and left to 
outweigh the mightier cause, and men are 
led to support the wicked thing, sin reigning 
in them and accomplishing its purposes of 
enslavement by using the lesser good to 
accomplish the greater. This is a true diag- 
nosis of much sinning of every degree. 
Whether we down righteousness by expe- 
diency, or whether the Jesuit, for love of 
Christ, sanctifies unrighteous means, or the 
Indian thug makes the victim of his assas- 
sination an offering to Shiva the destroyer, 
it is all the same ; it is the satisfaction of 
the moral nature with an object to result in 
its eternal enslavement to transgression. 
There results a moral complacency or satis- 



^reefcom of tfye Sons of (gob, 193 

faction with the condition of the slave ; then 
men can afford to scoff at moral issues, and 
rest satisfied with the reign of error in the 
community, for it is like their own moral 
state. 

Most singular is the conscience, for while 
it can be mastered for substance yet never 
wholly. As the German tribes never were 
conquered by the Roman legions, so we may 
term this the Gothic part of the kingdom of 
man-soul. The conscience money often re- 
stored, and the wishes that you and I have 
that we could make some wrongs right for 
which money cannot atone, the sudden start 
of guilty men when they see the face remind- 
ing them of their transgression, and the con- 
fession of undiscovered sin sometimes as 
damning as murder, confession of which is 
indeed dangerous, are cases in point. Some 
men with reminder, some men without re- 
minder, are each after all the slaves of fear 
which is born of sin. To have one's waking 
moments never secure from the dagger of 
one's conscience, or to put the face in post- 
ure as a kind of shield against the world to 
save us from the moral death that would 
follow on exposure, as Bismarck, or Tito 
Melema, put on armor and so saved himself 
13 



194 Hem Concepts of 016 Dogmas* 

from the dagger of the assassin, all this 
bespeaks slavery to a mastery ignoble and 
debasing. And the heart, how timid it is, 
how cringing before its master, that a stray 
shot from the bow of memory should set it 
straight a-quaking and ready to yield itself 
to horrors, perchance to death. 

That all men who profess faith in Christ 
and do not yield full devotion, reap accord- 
ing as they sow, and find partial deliver- 
ance and somewhat of hope, is but right. 
But those who make God their whole por- 
tion, like Cardinal Manning or like Living- 
stone and Gordon, like every saintly person 
on earth, find in saintliness a true freedom, 
with its bracing of the nerves and its buoy- 
ant life without fear. Said the Master, " If 
therefore the Son shall make you free, ye 
shall be free indeed." 



THE POWER OF HABIT. 

" I beseech you therefore, brethren, by the mercies 
of God, that ye present your bodies a living 
sacrifice, holy, acceptable unto God, which 
is your reasonable service." — Rom. 12 : 1. 

AT the beginning of an essay on "Cus- 
tom and Education," Lord Bacon says : 
" Men's thoughts are much according to their 
inclination ; their discourse and speeches ac- 
cording to their learning and infused opin- 
ions ; but their deeds are — as they have 
been accustomed." Education therefore is 
midway between the lawlessness of man's 
nature, which acts because it must, and the 
formal acts of man in society and forming a 
part thereof. This is a superficial definition ; 
habit is deeper than the external man. 
Thinking has habits as well as doing, saying 
as well as acting. All thinking seems an as- 
sociation of ideas, so that habit has its place 
in all thought. We have power to form an 
idea, but in calling it up we associate it with 
something else. We recall words by think- 
ing of the man that said them. We fix a date 
by something else that happened at the same 

(i95) 



196 Xitw Concepts of £)16 Dogmas* 

time. We recall a face through the form, 
clothing, and speech, and the incident 
through another associated thing. 

Language shows this same. The word 
thing, for instance, is the Anglo-Saxon 
thingan, " to become heavy," -hence it is any- 
thing material, and so often means any sepa- 
rable or distinguishable object of thought. 
By association of ideas this word has arisen. 
Likewise by association with it as an organic 
part of speech, it has power in language. 
That is, we use words according to certain 
well-defined senses established by the usages 
of society. The custom of society determines 
our vocabulary, for most part. Doing, say- 
ing, thinking, are all words expressive of 
conceptions formed of things habitually 
done, habit being an important factor therein. 
Verily, man is a creature of habit. 

It is not strange, therefore, that in moral 
things man has need of this same discipline 
of habit, which he has in every other depart- 
ment of his life. For this end alone, has 
society protected itself by innumerable laws, 
unwritten indeed, but all the same laws of 
moral power, each one a breakwater protect- 
ing the precious silver-laden argosies of the 
soul. It is easier to break the written law 



Cfye power of §ab\l 197 

than that moral law sustained by the senti- 
ment of a multitude. A written law is a very- 
strawy affair, without the moral support of 
public sentiment. The king's officers found 
it so when they went to cut the masts re- 
served in the New England forests for the 
roy,al navy. Sumptuary laws prove it so 
when the local sentiment does not conform 
to the laws enacted by the legislatures of 
their respective commonwealths. Indeed, 
our whole system of government, like all 
democracies, is simply an endeavor to put 
the written law in touch with popular senti- 
ment, that there may be less mobs in arms 
against government and more real effort 
made to benefit the masses. That public 
sentiment, therefore, which is mightier than 
the rule of kings, and without which the 
strongest legal finding is but weak as the 
paper on which it is written, however lofty 
the court that grants it, may well challenge 
the respect of you and me, however reluctant 
we may be to listen to its best judgment on 
moral and social questions, especially in so far 
as it has sought to advance righteousness in 
the hearts of all the people. But it is notice- 
able that those who deny legislative law, also 
deny the moral sentiments of mankind. They 



198 Hem Concepts of £)lb Dogmas. 

who break one kind of law break both kinds ; 
they are a law unto themselves. What they 
hate and condemn is restraint. 

Good habits have two special functions : 
First, they conserve natural endowment, 
making capacity tell in some given direction. 
A dozen colts in pasture, racing about from 
one end to the other, having sure habits 
indeed of a wild, roving sort, so that predic- 
tion may be made about them, such as, here 
they will come for water, and there for grass, 
when trained by habit to harness, will pull 
loads, or draw batteries, or proudly lead 
into battle cohorts of cavalry, each one as 
perfectly trained as the rider upon his back. 
Similarly, men are like a gregarious herd 
beating about for food, the satisfactions of 
thirst, and for companionship until the 
trained man shall supercede the untamed, 
and regularity of toil, either with head or 
hand, shall conserve the energy of life, 
and make productive the fallow lands of 
creaturehood. 

So in moral things there is a conservation 
of energy. Every one that is a student be- 
comes more and more conscious, as he pur- 
sues a literary or professional life, that there 
is a limit to human capacity. A man can 



£fye power of fyabit 199 

work so many hours, and can become so 
exhausted with bodily toil that he can labor 
no longer ; similarly, those who use their 
brains in any calling find they have their 
intellectual capacity, which they may de- 
velop, and which, when dissipated, their all 
is gone. That same capacity untrained can 
amount to but little. It is a conservation of 
that energy which, instead of being dissipated 
aimlessly, shall be turned into some channel 
where its output shall count. Here I am 
with this plant in the world ; it has a capac- 
ity for physical labor. I must exercise that 
in some way. The body is the basis of the 
intellectual life. I can so avoid the develop- 
ment of my body that I cannot half think. 
Undoubtedly all of us who do not perform 
manual labor in our callings err in having no 
thought of exercise and physical development 
of our bodies. The thought-power has rela- 
tions to the nervous system the physical 
basis of thought, and that system, is simi- 
larly dependent upon the rest of the body, 
upon which depends the exercise of its 
functions. 

The pale invalid stretched on a bed of 
languor, from which he cares not to limp 
out-of-doors by day and on which he can- 



200 Hem Concepts of £>lb Dogmas. 

not sleep at night, near by being the elec- 
tric light, which he can turn on at will 
through a button, and reaching out for the 
books heaped about him, beguiling himself 
from thought of his own deplorable con- 
dition to which he has been brought by 
forced and precocious intellectual develop- 
ment, is a fine illustration of how needful it 
is that habits of health be given the body, 
conserving the powers of the whole man. 
How much better it is, in the long run, to have 
a strong body with a stupid intellect, than a 
strong intellect stupefied, in the moiety at 
least, by the sickly incompetence of the body 
consequent upon its deterioration through 
the neglect to conserve it by healthful bodily 
habits. That the schools see this now and 
make provision for the health of pupils in 
providing proper training, is one of the best 
signs in our times. 

But granted a healthy mind and a sound 
body, the fact must not be lost sight of that 
the mind can do only so much and no more. 
Under too great a load of intellectual activi- 
ties the giant Spurgeon has recently suc- 
cumbed at fifty-seven. The mind is stricken 
down as under the blows of an enemy ; all 
the material for the maintenance of life has 



0?e power of §ab\t. 201 

been burned up by the torch of knowledge. 
It is the opinion of experts that the human 
body can do as much in eight hours as in 
ten, which, if true, will inevitably shorten the 
hours of labor. The human mind can un- 
doubtedly force itself as much as the body, 
possibly more so. But it, too, has its limits. 
Burn the torch twelve hours a day, and it 
will last thirty years ; burn it eight hours, 
and it will last fifty years. Make your hab- 
its, therefore, that they shall conserve the 
maintenance of life, and give the greatest 
possible output to labor. 

Do not, however, lose sight of the fact that 
in a given period which will fully exhaust 
the nervous powers of the body, only so 
much can be done, and nothing more. En- 
ergy once expended under these circum- 
stances is forever spent. If you give up your 
time to novel reading until the brain reels, 
there is nothing left for science or art or 
knowledge of any kind. The vis viva of the 
mind is gone ; you can put nothing in mo- 
tion. The molecules of the brain may act, 
but they cannot produce thought. You read 
the page, but cannot remember a line. As 
you can put only so much in, it behooves 
you to be careful what you put in. 



202 Hetx> Concepts of £>tt> Dogmas. 

These two truths I desire to apply to total 
abstinence. Use alcohol habitually, and you 
merely interfere with the normal running 
processes of the body. You burn up a little 
more fiber, nature's reserve for exigencies, 
exposing yourself to premature death from 
disease. You burn up what you need, what 
you cannot replace by any assistance of 
modern medicine. For a given output of 
thought you are paying an unnecessary per 
cent. And when we turn to the sociability 
of the saloon and the life of the inordinate 
drinker, the case truly becomes bad, What- 
ever may be the delights of intoxication, or 
the pleasures of those peculiar saloon friend- 
ships of which we hear so much, they are 
simply an expenditure of energy in foolish 
and useless fashion. The radiancy of the 
illumination of the mind is, however one 
may strive to conceal it, a burning out of 
the torch of nature, and a wasting of ener- 
gies which might have been diverted to 
noble purposes. 

See that dullard who, hulking about in all 
weathers, lives a hermit in squalor and lone- 
some solitariness. His education is noth- 
ing, and his natural power was wasted ; pure 
laziness stunts and spends the whole endow- 



Cfye power of §dbxt 203 

ment, and you despise him. But how about 
that other, resting his elbows on saloon 
counters, who has succeeded in life, using 
opportunities and achieving, but squandering 
in prodigality the precious endowments of 
God, chasing the mirages of the intoxicated 
imagination over every moor until the way 
is lost and every opportunity is gone, until 
heaven is obscured under the mists, and the 
Star of Bethlehem no more gives bearings 
for pilotage, and God, as he speaks through 
the moral law in the conscience, is heard no 
more, and the better nature does not sleep, 
but the rather dies a slow, lingering, but 
perfect death ? And yet we hesitate to ab- 
stain for the sake of the weak. 

Secondly, good habits not only conserve 
capacity, but they also enlarge and broaden 
it. In a trip to Escanaba I did not see a 
single harbor on the west side Lake Michigan 
which was not built by double rows of piles. 
So good habits open a path over the shallows 
of the soul, and bring a new commerce over 
the waters. Hence it is the man becomes 
great and strong ; he has conserved and en- 
larged himself. 

The day of genius is past ; its heroes are 
rapidly being forgotten. It is the Michael 



204 Xlew Concepts of £>lb Dogmas. 

Angelos, who by hard work achieve their 
place, winning immortal honors. This has 
been accepted ever since Wellington over- 
came the erratic Bonaparte at Waterloo 
by vulgar hard pounding which wore out 
sixty thousand fighters, but wound up for- 
ever, let us hope, among modern men the 
notion that any gift of birth can keep pace 
with the increment which may be added to 
a bright mind as it shall develop under the 
power of habit. Bacon quotes Machiavelli 
where he says, " There is no trusting to the 
force of nature, nor to the boastfulness of 
words, except it be corroborated by custom." 
This is truth ; many men promise reform, 
few men follow it out to the end. The habit 
of the person will alone tell us what his word 
is worth. You would not take the promise of 
a man whom you knew to be habitually un- 
truthful, because you count his habit stronger 
than his promise. It is easier to make a silk 
purse out of a sow's ear than to make any- 
thing out of him who has no habits you 
can trust. He who habitually does his duty 
is the man who rises to opportunities, and 
who is equal thereto. Coolness and audacity 
made Grant what he was ; thoroughness was 
the characteristic of George H. Thomas ; de- 



0?e pomer of tyabit 205 

votion to the will of God furnishes the key to 
the character of the great Spurgeon, now, 
alas ! no more, and doing one's duty, to that 
of Gordon, Livingstone, and Mackay. 

Now, what interferes with all habit but 
this, the irrationality of appetite and the 
whim of desire ? Ten thousand million wills 
have been broken down the past century 
by drink. I do not care about the pro- 
cess, whether they began as moderate drink- 
ers or not. Sufficient for me is it, to know 
that they have been mastered who had other- 
wise mastered themselves. On the altar 
of this Moloch have been sacrificed thou- 
sands of millions of good intentions, dear, 
sweet, good intentions, as nice to look upon 
as red apples in God's country across the 
mountains of Oregon, to which the Cali- 
fornia miners turned with longing eyes. But 
without good habits they can be easily 
shaken off by the slightest wind of appetite, 
as the Early Rose and the Summer Harvest 
grafts, high up in the old-fashioned apple- 
trees in the East, when fully ripened, were 
shaken down by the earliest zephyrs of the 
morning, and so, lying toothsome upon the 
dewy grass, were soon in a swine's snout. 
A great painter typified gluttony by painting 



206 Xizvo Concepts of £>lb Dogmas. 

under it a figure in despair trying to fight its 
way upward over a cloud fashioned like a 
swine's head. Fit symbol that for the stimu- 
lated appetite that rules in the person given 
over to the beastiality of drunkenness ! In 
the words of the apostle, "I beseech you, 
therefore, brethren, that ye present your 
bodies a living sacrifice, holy, acceptable 
unto God, which is your reasonable service," 
which, as we interpret it, in these days of 
the riot of appetite, means, " Live total ab- 
stinence lives." 



HONEST SELF-DENIAL 

" But insomuch as ye are partakers of Christ's 
sufferings, rejoice." — / Peter 4. : 13. 

WE cannot enter into Christ's passion by- 
thrusting ourselves into suffering as a 
means of purchasing the divine favor. It is 
glorious to suffer, if one must, to preserve 
some righteousness or to save some good 
cause. This premise should be prefixed to 
everything we may say on self-denial, as the 
soul loves false weights and measures, and is 
often as eager for them as dishonest traders 
for false balances. 

The one thing on which self-denial de- 
pends is love, like the love of Christ, that 
flowered aright in silver blossoms, which re- 
tain their beauty through the far-spent ages. 
He that loveth much doeth much ; he that 
loveth little doeth little ; he that loveth 
naught doeth naught. So thou canst easily 
put thyself where thou belongest. Didst 
thou ever do it, and find the teaching of 
God's book of life in thine own heart ? Thus 
self-denial may be thy condemner, and give 

(207) 



208 Xizw Concepts of 2)16 Dogmas, 

thee a moment's dissatisfaction ; and so it 
shall be always to us all. But we may make 
self-denial our coadjutor, helper, friend. For 
comradeship and fellowship with this mystic 
one, if thou art candidate, a few simple rules 
I give thee for thy novitiate, that thou 
mayest come as men of old came to the 
Pythagorean mysteries in which thou art to 
walk in white with the chosen ones of purest 
counsels, and together with them learn the 
deep mysteries of the hidden life. Three sim- 
ple rules are presented as guiding thoughts 
concerning that way. Self-denial demands 
sacrifice ; yes, indeed, but note well, a sacri- 
fice on your part ; I give thee, therefore, the 
first rule : — 

All true self-sacrifice is a sacrifice of your- 
self and not of some one else, and further- 
more, a sacrifice of yourself alone, and not of 
yourself plus some one else. 

This may not commend itself to your judg- 
ment, but let us see. A layman marries a 
wife, changes his mind as to his calling in 
life, and drags her unwillingly into the 
self-denial of a home missionary field. This 
he has no moral right to do. He has a 
right to sacrifice himself and no one else. 
Or a person puts himself in such a place 



honest Self'&emd. 209 

that his children do not have suitable op- 
portunities in life. The man has done well 
by himself, but he has not remembered 
others in his plan of life. Or he may un- 
wisely plan his great philanthropy, and bring 
it to naught, causing the useless benevolence 
of those who heard his call, but have been 
sorry ever since that they gave heed, and 
tried to help him out. It is this view of the 
case which has led the preacher to feel that 
celibacy would be a powerful adjunct in mis- 
sionary operations ; not an enforced celibacy, 
but one which is essential to true self-denial, 
which would sacrifice itself and no one else. 
The bitterness of spirit in some hearts, 
owing to the self-denial to which they have 
been unwillingly forced to become parties, 
has made me feel most keenly that good 
men and women must needs be more careful, 
not how they sacrifice themselves, but how 
they sacrifice something themselves, while 
they throw the weight of their burden of love 
for the sake of which they hope to shine 
in heaven on ojther people's shoulders, as if 
good service in the kingdom of God con- 
sisted in large measure of a person's success 
in dragging others in and attaching them to 
the car of the Lord, and compelling them 
14 



210 Heu> Concepts of £>lb Dogmas. 

to drag it through weary years, whether they 
will or no. 

Self-sacrifice should not be selfish sacrifice. 
This false self-sacrifice has been parodied in 
the world. If it were not the preacher's set- 
tled conviction that a laugh in church serv- 
ice has no moral value, he would illustrate 
it by a story. But this much needs to be 
said, that this kind of false heroics, the jest 
of the street, deserves to be pilloried in the 
house of God, and given the brand of Cain as 
sign of its eternal shame. 

Self-denial which entails sacrifice upon 
others and in no wise upon ourselves, is well 
illustrated in some forms of pious good ad- 
vice. College presidents advise boys to go 
as missionaries ; why do they not go them- 
selves ? City preachers advise men to self- 
sacrifice in humble parishes. The rich invite 
the poor to large self-denials, while they do 
not invite themselves to a single cup of 
coffee less. We advise forgiveness, but our- 
selves nourish wrath on slight occasion. It 
seems as if a person washed waifs on con- 
tract, at a cheap lodging house in the city, 
and sudsed them well, regardless of eyes 
and mouth, but neglected his own person, 
carefully rubbing off the soap dry which 



honest Self^emaL 211 

had come upon his own hands and refusing 
the application of water. For to tell the 
truth it is only the filthy imaginings of a 
vain mind that despises the purifications of 
self-sacrifice. This whole style of life is con- 
temptible. It is pious cant, which covers not 
a multitude of sins but a horde of lies, part of 
which we tell ourselves, and part of which 
we tell other people. All of this self-deceit 
is due to wrong conceptions of self-denial, 
as a thing the sham appearance of which 
is very blessed ; whereas the only bless- 
ing is in the heart, which is always alloyed 
by even the consciousness that the deed is a 
thing of common fame, the credit thereof 
becoming an arousement of pride and the 
temptation to a sham life of hypocrisy, var- 
nished over with pretentious acts and words 
of self-denial which cost nothing and hence 
are a good stock in trade, if that sort of stock 
is the kind desired. 

The second rule of self-sacrifice is as fol- 
lows : Sacrifice all you want to, except your 
better self. 

Some people think that in religion they 
have no self; which is unfortunately not 
true. This self undoubtedly has duties ; it 
has also rights which cannot be denied with- 



212 Hetp Concepts of £)16 Dogmas. 

out loss of power and function on the nobler 
side of life. This is easily illustrated. In 
the old church many a man went into a 
monastery and became a Benedictine monk, 
and spent his time tilling the land, which 
meant something for civilization, though but 
little to himself. After years of devotion to 
religion and the church he was a piece of a 
man. It is all very well at first blush for 
ministers to say nothing that remotely bears 
on moral questions, for fear some one will 
take offense, but when after a course of years 
the individual has lost the use of his moral 
powers of stamina, you find that there is only 
the fraction of a man in the pulpit. When a 
person cannot read the daily papers without 
sin, as I used to hear some say out East, and 
who therefore despised all knowledge of cur- 
rent events as sinful, they had a wrong kind 
of religion, because it militated against the 
perfect, noble, fully developed, all-round man- 
manhood and womanhood, which it is the 
right of every believer to possess. 

Christianity was not meant to be a limita- 
tion on individual advancement. Great bur- 
dens of self-sacrifice which dwarf the man 
should be undertaken solely when the person 
is fully convinced that the sacrifices involved 



fyontst Self'&emaL 213 

are justified in view of what he can accom- 
plish ; that is, whether loss in one direction 
may not be made up by gain in another. 
There is, of course, the familiar considera- 
tion of the advantage gained by the special- 
ist in the branch to which he gives attention, 
in consequence of which much must be lost 
in the broader range of things. 

We see the same thing in all life. Agassiz 
could tell by a bone the character of the 
fish to which it belonged, and this was re- 
markably verified by subsequent discovery, 
but he knew little besides natural science. 
So in religion, one man cannot do every- 
thing, he must specialize, and with the gain 
there must be the loss. Next to murder, 
suicide is ranked as mortal sin, that is, next 
to murder of another is the murder of self. 
So it seems, next to the sacrifice of others 
is the sacrifice of one's self in moral things ; 
the first is cowardly, the second is foolish. 
Does that seem hard ? It is true, whether 
hard or not. Who doubts that the millions 
of monks have squandered their better selves 
under vows, and well-kept vows often, of the 
utmost self-abnegation. 

Protestantism, too, has made similar mis- 
take, though not with such awful conse- 



214 Xizw Concepts of £>I6 Dogmas. 

quences. We, too, have taught that the 
motive behind the act alone sanctifies that 
act. Thus have we glorified stupidity on 
the one hand, and stricken the Lord's cause 
on the other, for a round man in a square 
hole cannot glorify God as he ought. Wit- 
ness in the many and many a minister who 
is confident that the Lord called him into 
his work, and the unanimous, or all but 
unanimous, conviction of every one else that 
God called some one else, and he answered. 
Now we make bold to say that in spoiling 
a good business man to make a preacher 
who is utterly incapable of being useful, is 
strange way of making self-denial tell for 
righteousness. 

There is on Somerset street, Boston, a fine 
brick building belonging to the theological 
department of Boston University ; it is called 
Jacob Sleeper Hall, after the donor. Jacob 
Sleeper, when a young man, was a student 
for the ministry in the Methodist Church, 
but his eyes failed him, and he gave his at- 
tention to business. He was very successful, 
and became a millionaire, but he did not lose 
his early bent. He was the Nestor of all 
Methodist enterprises in New England, par- 
ticularly of the Boston University, and sup- 



f}onest Self^&emaL 215 

ported eight or ten ministers all the time 
himself, each one of whom doubtless did 
more good than Jacob Sleeper himself could 
possibly have done if he had gone into the 
ministry, and had given his life to what 
would, on the face of it, seem a more self- 
denying experience. This man was provi- 
dentially stayed in his mad career. God, 
however, I am persuaded, would have us 
stay ourselves by fully counting the cost. 
For this purpose I bid you sacrifice all except 
your better self. Remember that a gift for 
one thing is sacrificed, if, destroying it, you 
persist in turning to something to which you 
are not adapted. Remember the endowment 
of your nature is a gift of God, especial and 
holy, and at first hand from the Lord and 
Giver of life. 

The third rule of self-sacrifice is : Check- 
mate evil thoughts with antidotes. 

" I will not think this thing," amounts to 
but little, in the ordinary experience of 
temptation. To make that will against evil 
thoughts powerful, you must give it the 
panacea of something else to think about, 
which shall be free of association with the 
wicked thought. Prayer, a scripture pas- 
sage, a verse from a Christian poet, has often 



216 HetD Concepts of £>lb Dogmas. 

been the salvation of a person from his bad 
thoughts. A good book is a power in help- 
ing men and women over the frictions of 
every-day life. As married people settle 
down, they find a life which for most 
stretches away from them like the great 
plains of the river systems in the West, 
seemingly flat as a floor, above which there 
is a brilliant sunshine falling upon a beauti- 
ful verdure, but replaced now and then by 
clouds and storm. The monotony of that 
level life will be broken, if one can but 
call in the wizards of the imagination, and 
through poetry and prose read silently or 
aloud ; new vistas are disclosed, as when 
the ravine by the water-courses opens up to 
one on the river heights, and the eye sees 
again a diversified landscape, with the early 
autumnal tints painting all with the colors 
of a divine artist. So we may find antidote 
against the corroding cares of daily life. 

We sometimes fawn upon others ; believe 
me, we fawn too often upon our baser selves. 
And by sentimentality, as if personal pleas- 
ure must always have a whole hide, we foster 
the same spirit in others. Why, poor man, 
he is struggling with his appetite ; poor fel- 
low, how helpless he is ; let all men pity and 



^onest Self-bemal. 217 

wring their hands ! Now I suggest that he 
play the man. Penitents in monasteries lash 
themselves for their evil thoughts. If any 
man would free himself from appetite, let 
him similarly persuade himself that his appe- 
tite is not too good to be trampled upon as 
a hated thing ; then let him buy in some 
leather store a knout such as is used in 
Russia without stint upon the backs of free- 
men who as much as dare to criticise the 
Czar's officers ; and when the glamour of the 
senses is arising which will soon shut out 
the light of day from the moral universe of 
that microcosm, let him bare his shoulders 
and whip himself, and believe me, praying God 
to nerve his arm, he will soon, holding this 
form of self-denial firmly before him, monas- 
tic though it is, be able through self-denial 
to trample his destroyer under foot. This 
may seem severe, but no man who longs for 
the mastery of himself through the help 
which Christ can give has a right to say that 
he really wants to be free until he can go to 
this degree of self-denial in hatred of his own 
pleasure and in determination to master him- 
self through an antidote of suffering. More- 
over it seems to the preacher that the person 
who thus through prayer and suffering comes 



218 XTeu> Concepts of £)15 Dogmas. 

back to mastery of himself and to peace with 
God, doth partake of the sufferings of Christ 
in the redemption of humanity as no world- 
ling can who curls his legs under his chair, 
and eaten up by his comforts in life, sighs 
over the redemption of humanity at such 
tremendous cost, and perchance sheds a 
few briny tears. Such a life of self-denial 
doth by its suffering join on to the sufferings 
of the " Son of man who was the Son of God." 
Every one of us needs to deny ourselves to 
the quick, that we may enter into the pas- 
sion of the Lord Jesus Christ. 



IGNORANCE IN MORAL 
CHARACTER. 

" Let us hold fast our confession. For we have 
not a High Priest that cannot be touched 
with the feeling of our infirmities ; but one 
that hath been in all points tempted like as 
we are, yet without sin." — Heb, 4 : if. 

HERE stands a murderer at the bar ; why 
a craning of necks to see him ? why the 
moral sentence which condemns him ? except 
it be that public sentiment scorns him for 
the sensations which he has made his own, 
and which have left indelible impress on his 
character. Men in armies are enlisted that 
they may kill when need comes, else their 
service were a sham. But we are told that 
no man likes to say he killed another, and 
that when a person is known to have done 
such an act, especially in a wanton manner, 
he is a marked person among his fel- 
lows, and is disliked and shunned by them, 
because of knowledge which each esteems a 
blemish upon moral character. The glory 
of arms is not in the death one deals, so 

(219) 



220 Hem Concepts of £>lb Dogmas, 

much as the death one faces ; it is the glo- 
rious unflinching in face of mortal peril, and 
not an envenomed temper. We love to say 
our brave are magnanimous for this reason, 
and to lay stress upon every noblest thing 
about them. We would have our soldier 
ignorant of much of what dastards boast ; 
even courage and the glories of valor pale 
under certain circumstances. We expect, 
then, knowledge and ignorance to be side by 
side, and reckon the strength of one in pro- 
portion with the lack of the other. 

There is a gamut of experience here, but 
no half-tones ; each note must be clear, with 
no quaver ; it is not a study of harmonies, 
but the note of nature. Art has nothing to 
do with character ; it is be, and be not ; act, 
and refuse to act ; it is quality, and absence 
of quality. 

Christ, we say, was without sin. This is 
more than a Christian dogma ; we esteem it 
a Christian fact. It is one of the things 
which we would stand for against all comers, 
and without recourse. But if Christ was 
without sin, it was a personality which 
lacked the experience of that sinning which 
is a factor in human life. Yet we say that 
Christ knew the depth of human weakness, 



3gnorance in ZHoral Character* 221 

and lived among men that He might be the 
perfect Saviour of sinners. These two facts 
thus held indicate that the ignorance of the 
God-man's spirit and His appreciation of 
human need are not contradictory terms, and 
that there was nothing essential in sin as sin 
to His earthly ministry. Moreover, it does 
not seem too much to say that the strength 
of His character, the uniqueness and beauty 
of His life, depend upon that ignorance of 
the Christ in large degree. Jupiter, the head 
of the Graeco-Roman deities, had his mar- 
riages, amours, hates, quarrels, petulancies, 
and personal spites ; Jesus, our Christ, had 
nothing of the sort in His life on earth or in 
His heavenly nature. The uniqueness, there- 
fore, of the Christian Deity in good measure 
resides in His ignorance. But the ignorance 
of Christ was more than absence of knowl- 
edge ; it is really equivalent to knowledge 
ignored, innocency prized. Christ's life was 
not one which led Him apart from transgres- 
sion ; for He lived on an earth defiled, con- 
taminated, and corrupted by sin ; in a moral 
atmosphere reeking with it, in a human so- 
ciety perverted by it, with a human heart 
open as no other animal organism was to it. 
But with these surroundings, the blessed Son 



222 Xltvo Concepts of £>16 Dogmas, 

of Mary despised it. His ignorance, there- 
fore, was an ignoring of it all. In other 
words, it was an ignorance born of resolu- 
tion. On this hung the sinlessness of the 
Christ during His earthly ministry, and the 
loss of it would have been the loss of His 
function as Saviour, and His capacity to 
execute the will of God foreordained in the 
councils of heaven, when the Lamb without 
spot was slain before the foundation of the 
world. 

To the question, "What is the difference 
between Christ and Mohammed, or between 
Christ and Confucius, or between Christ and 
Buddha?" we give answer of course, That 
which must exist between man and the God- 
man ; but to sum it up in an analogy, we say 
it is the difference between knowledge of 
transgression and transgression ignored. 

It is not what we are thrown into that 
determines our life. Of course there is the 
circumstance of birth and environment which 
determines in the rough careers ; but that 
once settled and a life in a civilized land 
granted, and the position of the individual 
being determined so far as the theater of 
events is concerned, the place of the person 
amid his surroundings will be fixed by what 



3gnorance in 2T£oral Character. 223 

he ignores in the life which he leads. That 
editor who was congratulated upon the high 
character which his paper maintained, said 
in reply that it was not so much what he 
printed as what he refused to print, that had 
made his paper what it was. This shows 
the course of our argument. So in our lives ; 
what we avoid will accurately determine our 
life, and the force of virtuous living consid- 
ered as output from the motive of the human 
heart resides in what we will not do. For 
doing, freely assented to, is a pleasure, and 
what we do for our own sake is not that thing 
which gives determinative force to careers. 
The real virtue of living must arise from what 
we do that is hard and disagreeable, because 
it is our duty, which we are not often called 
upon to perform, and in abstaining from doing 
what we know to be wrong, which is a con- 
stant quantity in our living. 

The book-makers on our racing tracks are 
but the machinery of a large element in the 
life of our time, which finds the sensations of 
gambling, accentuated by the uncertainties 
and struggles of the racing turf, of greatest 
possible pleasure. Aside from those who fol- 
low the turf, for the money there is in it, is a 
large class of persons who follow it for pleas- 



224 XTett) Concepts of £>16 Dogmas, 

ure. Much depends upon horse and man, the 
position assigned, the accidents, the skill of 
the driver, the condition of the beast. And 
when the interest, which each person must 
feel when he is only an observer, is heightened 
by the stake in money which he puts up, 
there results a full tide of excited enthusi- 
asm, with its alternation of hopes and fears, 
which is a pleasurable sensation, attempts 
to realize which are known as the gambling 
mania. But I noticed in Prof. Waldstein's 
article, " The Finding of the Tomb of Aris- 
totle," the following statement apropos his 
work last year in Eretria : " However full 
of moments of thrilling excitement — mo- 
ments that in their intensity have no equal 
in any other department of scientific work 
or sport — the practice of excavation may 
be, there are days and even weeks of dis- 
couraging ill success, which sorely try the 
patience of even the most sanguine and 
persevering." That is to say, there is an 
excited enthusiasm in archaeology which is 
comparable with similar sensations on the 
turf, so that a man may stand as breathless 
watching the digging out of a grave 2000 
years old, as following the plunges of the fa- 
vorite horse on which he has staked a purse. 



3gnorance in UToral Character. 225 

It is obvious that the excitements of the 
turf are poor preparations for the business 
of living. He who craves sensations of this 
sort, and satisfying himself therewith is con- 
tent, will not usually be turned to the enthu- 
siasms of His calling and to the sensations 
of its triumphs. But says some one, "You 
are confusing business and pleasure." That 
may be, but the success of each life will after 
all depend upon its pleasures. There is hardly 
a business man but would prefer a young 
person in his employ should be ignorant 
of the ways of the course, of the slang of the 
jockey, and the morals of the plunger. Moral 
health seems to depend upon decisions in 
such questions. The good man is not he 
that knoweth everything that the world 
knoweth, but rather he who ignores much 
which that worldling prizeth. 

This is the reason why our homes are so 
blest in all their relations of life ; namely, 
because there is one place in the world 
where what is worst is shut out and where 
souls may live in ignorance of the vice, sin, 
misery, and wickedness of earth. This ex- 
plains why it is that the loss of a good home 
to which the memory may turn, is like the 
misery of the damned. Parents watch their 



226 Hem Concepts of £)16 Dogmas, 

children with anxiety and care as they pass 
from youth to manhood, solicitous that they 
may on the one hand be ignorant of the 
worst that is in the world, and on the other, 
that, thrown in contact with the evil of the 
world, they may ignore it, and keep their 
hearts and minds in the love of God. For 
to know not evil is not enough, but ignorant ; 
to ignore it, and to refuse its impression on 
the soul, this is the way to walk with those 
who make this life a pilgrimage, and not a 
fatality, and whose lips are laden with the 
songs of heavenly love. 

Here comes in a criticism of the modern 
college. Three or four hundred men are 
severed from the restraints of home, and, in- 
cited by the sociability of friendship to mild 
dissipations, are left to find out what the 
world is. There results a kind of student 
ruffianism, with its drinking bouts, its fires at 
night on the campus, its gambling in a small 
way, and the formation of a convivial set 
often prominent at the first few reunions after 
graduation. Then, too, there is that queer 
thing known as college sentiment, which 
often interferes with the moral law, such as 
cheating through examinations or stealing 
small things as mementoes, whether it be 



39ttorance in ZHoral Character. 227 

sign boards, or conductor's lanterns, or hotel 
ink-stands, or curtain-fixtures, or what not. 
Now the preacher is free to say that he ap- 
preciates the advantages and uses of an educa- 
tion, but why is it necessary to get it in any 
such way ? College men are peculiarly in- 
fluenced by this idea of seeing what is in 
the world. It is a mistake. Knowledge is 
power, that is, of books and facts and men, 
not knowledge of vice and of the basest dissi- 
pations. I would pray God to bring into my 
life no new factors of sin and temptation, 
that my knowledge may not be so freighted 
with evil that knowledge itself will become a 
doubtful boon. 

Say : shall a man choose his house or his 
horse or his friend, and by that act of choice in 
each instance refuse at a glance one or more 
which he does not want, but in moral things 
wallow through the mire of the world's 
wickedness in order to know what he does 
not desire ? It would be as reasonable to go 
through filthy tenements when looking for a 
home, or to ride after spavined horses and 
have one or two die of heaves on the street, 
when one wanted a family horse, as to wade 
through the abysmal swinishness of some 
vicious men to find out whether you desire 



228 Hem Concepts of £)16 Dogmas, 

them for boon companions, or to harbor every 
wicked thought to see whether that is the 
kind you will foster. I fear that if we 
should spend our time in the squalor of the 
wretched homes of the poor, we should not 
love the green grass. This is the reason that 
you drive your carriage through the best 
streets of the city. That is the reason why 
philanthropy is such a terrible thing to un- 
dertake, — because the odor of filth does not 
leave you when you come to your own table ; 
and the grime of the place some way, linger- 
ing on your eyeballs, blurs the beauty of the 
sunshine, so that only as men love good will 
they leave heights and go down among the 
poor. I fear, too, that if you study defective 
horses, every horse will be alike to you, and 
you will lose your concept of a perfect horse. 
So in the domain of holiness and morals ; 
contaminate yourself by knowing what sin 
is before you know holiness in its best estate, 
and you cannot know that holiness when 
you meet it face to face. For sin is like the 
basilisk of mythology, which poisons a man 
by its breath, if perchance he shall come so 
near. The spotlessness of Mary's Son is the 
spotlessness for humanity. Therefore know 
as little of the bad as you can ; poison not in- 



3gnorcmce in UToral Character. 229 

telligence by transgression. Surround thy- 
self with the good; ennoble and elevate thy 
thoughts. Seek not multiplicity of sensations ; 
choose thy lot. It were better that the eye 
should be burned out by the strategy of an 
enemy, than with two eyes to be compelled to 
see all the world's misery, the full depths of its 
shame, the awfulness of its crime. For ears 
that are closed hear not the whisperings of 
the tempter ; and though we pity the deaf be- 
cause they do not hear at all, yet all is not 
lost, and there is contentment in looking at 
the stars all the deeper and sweeter if one 
does not hear the dog baying at the moon. 
It will be the noblest of lives when one can 
say, " Innocence passed me, and I prepared 
its way. Goodness was my guest, and I sent 
him forth unsullied. Love I knew, and re- 
turned unselfishly. Loathsome Envy, hate- 
ful Untruth, gluttonous Appetite, snarling 
Malice I saw, but passed by." 

There is a bale of vices some men carry on 
their backs to the very edge of the grave. 
They represent their cast-off vices, which 
have served them in their day, and which 
they love. They hope the same grave will 
cover them both. But Innocency has no lug- 
gage to weight her down. There are no 



230 Tizxo Concepts of £>16 Dogmas. 

scales on her eyes ; she can view the heavenly 
gates, and bear the rays of celestial light. 
No grave is welcome to her spirit ; the light 
of life is in her azure eyes, and the aureole of 
life is about her head. 



THE PATIENCE OF CHRIST. 

" Likewise also the chief priests mocking Him 
with the scribes and elders said, He saved 
others, Himself He cannot save." — Matt. 
27 : 41 , 42. 

THE last part of the collect for the Sunday 
next before Easter reads, " Mercifully 
grant that we may both follow the example 
of His patience, and also be made partakers 
of His resurrection, through the same Jesus 
Christ our Lord." Apprehension and recog- 
nition of the patience of our Lord breathes 
through, and finds admirable statement in, our 
text. Patience is not resignation ; we are re- 
signed in submission to another because it is 
his will ; we are patient with our fate because it 
is our will. Christ was resigned, and showed 
it in Gethsemane ; Christ was patient, and 
showed it all through passion week in His mar- 
velous self-control. We magnify and try to ap- 
preciate this day the patience of Jesus Christ. 
Patience could overleap its bounds, but will 
not. Resignation sits with folded hands and 
awaits death. It is a blessed sight, that of 
resignation when the life nears its close, and 

(231) 



232 Hem Concepts of £>lb Dogmas, 

the task is ended. How sweet to see age 
thus sit with folded hands, submissive, and 
giving to every beholder the sense of its own 
quietude ! But patience suffers that it may- 
achieve ; the patient persevere. This is the 
most glorious trait of men of Anglo-Saxon 
blood. 

In the great storm at Samoa, the English 
steamer " Calliope, " to escape from the harbor 
must needs pass between the American ship 
" Trenton " and the reef upon which she was 
drifting. Four hundred stalwart American 
seamen face to face with death, witnessing 
the skillful seamanship of Captain Kane and 
the courage of the effort, gave three mighty 
cheers for the English vessel. A London 
paper said it was " the expression of an 
immortal courage. It was distressed man- 
hood greeting triumphant manhood, the 
doomed saluting the saved." Yes, and it 
was one thing more, the tribute of patience 
to patience, of patience in defeat saluting 
patience in victory. It is not strange, there- 
fore, that the Anglo-Saxon race should be 
most impressed with the patience of Christ. 
We call it His manliness. It was patience 
under persecution which led our fathers into 
the wilderness, forsaking the comforts of 



Cfye patience of Christ. 233 

civilization ; it explains why the plantation 
at Jamestown failed, while the plantation at 
Plymouth lived. 

I notice that the patience of Christ was of 
the most elevated type. In human life there 
are two consummate acts of destiny, the en- 
vironment into which we are born, and the 
hour and circumstances of our death. At 
the birth of Christ we do not think of the 
Godhead as hushed at the instant of the in- 
carnation, but rather of an awestruck earth 
receiving the Prince of Peace. On the other 
hand, we can but believe that at the cruci- 
fixion, heaven and its hosts hung upon the 
minute when the Son of God entered upon 
His death agony. Could the Father witness 
unmoved the Son's acceptance of the full 
measure of His humanity, even the death of 
the body ? And if the Father lost the equi- 
poise of the eternities in those moments 
when the sufferer said, " I thirst," or when 
He forgave the impenitent thief, or when He 
cried with a loud voice, " My God, my God, 
why hast Thou forsaken me ?" or when with 
the words, " Father, into Thy hands I com- 
mend my spirit/' He gave up the Ghost, and 
the veil of the temple was rent in twain ; 
must we not believe that the shadow cast 



234 Hem Concepts of £)16 Dogmas* 

by His destiny of death, ever drawing a little 
nearer, even as the shadow of the dial passes 
lower and lower while the sun dips in the west 
and the night is at hand, was ever upon His 
spirit, and deepened as the hour was come ? 
He foreknew His coming, if scripture is to 
be believed, and he came prepared for the 
body ; but so do we all. 

" Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting ; 

The soul that rises with us, our life's star, 
Hath had elsewhere its setting, 
And cometh from afar : 

Not in entire forgetfulness, 

And not in utter nakedness ; 
But trailing clouds of glory do we come 

From God, who is our home." 

On the other hand, Christ knew that He 
must die, so do you ; and Christ went forward 
with somewhat of shrinking, so do we ; and 
the life was stricken out of Him, even as it 
must be out of us. As He left behind the 
glory of His patience as a legacy to human 
kind for all ages, so let us be possessed of the 
same self-constancy, that we may illustrate 
glorious examples of patience after the same 
blessed type ; for the fruit of Jesus 1 life was 



£fye patience of Christ 235 

not three tours amid two hundred village 
towns of Galilee, or His three passovers at 
Jerusalem, or everything He did from the 
manger to the grave ; but the true fruitage of 
His life was His passion of patience, the 
master-motive of His career, which might 
have been seen had we been there in every 
nervous step from the judgment hall of 
Pontius Pilate to Mount Calvary, and which 
culminated in the death-agony. The pa- 
tience of Jesus must have been solely in view 
of His death. He knew His future, for He 
prophesied concerning it, both the resurrec- 
tion and the ascension, including His office of 
intercession. His ultimate triumph was a 
solace for His present humiliation. Heaven 
to Him was like heaven for us, a present solace 
because it held hopes of future comfort. As 
the soldiers of the late war bore the fatiguing 
march under the hot Southern sun, or mined 
and counter-mined at seiges, delved in breast- 
works, charged into craters, fought with the 
ferocity of beasts, and at some news of great 
victory won, transported, broke into cheers 
and disorderly enthusiasm, not because they 
were resigned, but because they were patient 
in view of the promised peace toward which 



236 Xtetp Concepts of £)R> Dogmas. 

they were struggling and for which they were 
pining, so we look forward, buoyed by the 
patience of hope. 

We love to think of ourselves as sol- 
diers of the cross, for whom the never-dying 
laurels of victory are already won, and great 
and glorious blessings of peace are assured. 
For this reason we seize most eagerly the 
promises of the Master concerning the bless- 
edness of the future life. The promises, 
however, cannot do away with the sharp- 
ness of death. That the promises are an 
assistance to the sick, is undoubted, for they 
fill the mind where otherwise there would 
be a dull monotony of pain. That the Holy 
Ghost sustains the dying, and often in in- 
stances of great and true faith fills them in 
the death struggle with the ravishment 
of hope prematurely fulfilled, is undoubted 
in the mind of the preacher, but death is 
death ; the grave must have mastery over 
the flesh. 

A maxim of the old Stoics runs : " Out of 
the universe from the beginning everything 
which happens has been apportioned and 
spun out to thee ; " and again, " Whatever 
may happen to thee, it was prepared for thee 
from all eternity ; and the entwining of 



£f?e Patience of Cfyrtst. 237 

causes was from all eternity spinning the 
thread of thy being, and of that which is 
incident to it." But this is not the Christian 
conception of life; we believe indeed that 
God's plans for us begin from the past ages 
of eternity, but destiny in the sense of un- 
controllable and uncontrolled fate is evi- 
denced in only two things, our birth and our 
death. We are compelled to assume the 
inevitable ; for one to say that he hates his 
life is nothing strange, but he must bear it. 
Now while death is under control in the 
sense that we may take our own lives, this 
is so abnormal an experience that for all 
practical purposes we may assume all desire 
to live. The man desires to live, but he is 
fated to perish, and even the suicide can- 
not escape from life save by the doorways 
of death. This inevitable dissolution of the 
body, the ultimate enemy alike of wealth, 
ambition, power, poverty, need, and sin, was 
the heritage of Jesus from His humanity. 

When we are sick, we send for the physi- 
cian, and tax all his resources on our behalf; 
we summon up the scattered forces of the 
will, and make ourselves ready for a great 
stand ; we turn to God, the acknowledged 
arbiter of our destiny, and strive to carry the 



238 Xlcw Concepts of £)16 Dogmas. 

citadel of heaven by the storm of our peti- 
tions beating against its walls. And this or 
that mky avail for the nonce ; but it is only 
a respite, we must again hear the beatings 
of the wings of the angel of death. Grant 
could win at Appomattox, but he could not 
win against his last great enemy in the cot- 
tage at Mount M'Gregor. But there are 
many instances which seem to indicate that 
a fixed fate is certain to us. The precau- 
tions of cowardice often bring the victim but 
nearer to death. The hero of thirty battles, 
just passed through, dies in his bed. Emin 
Pasha, rescued by Stanley after years of 
isolation in the Equatorial Provinces of Af- 
rica, at an expense to the British govern- 
ment of $150,000, falls from a balcony at 
Bagamoyo at the banquet of his friends, and 
nearly perishes. Gen. Dan. E. Sickles, to- 
day prominent in New York politics, I re- 
member well as he came home from the war, 
having lost a leg in the cause, and my youth- 
ful blood thrilled to hear of his hairbreadth 
escapes, of the horses shot from under him, 
and his wounds at Gettysburg. "A thou- 
sand shall fall at thy side, and ten thousand 
at thy right hand, but it shall not come nigh 
thee." 



£f?e patience of Christ. 239 

As therefore this thing is so often beyond 
us and a matter of God's decree, it surely 
behooveth us to meet it without fear ; but 
then who can ? No human being that loves 
life and many days can honestly say he does 
not fear to die. Each would ask, if it were 
imminent, a few moments for preparation, 
and those few minutes would be the best of 
our lives ; each least bit of devotion and 
goodness in us would rise to the surface and 
be skimmed. 

A just appreciation of Christ's patience can 
only be had when we consider that He knew 
the end from the beginning, and did not 
have the resource of uncertainty which is 
the privilege of us all. He knew His time, 
and during passion week stood within its 
shadow. He knew that nothing could save 
Him. " The Son of man must suffer many 
things at the hands of the elders, and on the 
third day be raised from the dead." Like a 
criminal under sentence of death He could 
say, " I have five days to live, or four days 
to live, or three," and witness the ever-nar- 
rowing marge of time this side eternity, with 
no buffer of uncertainty to break its force. 
Our stand against death is bad enough, but 
His was worse ; alone He stood with the cer- 



240 Hero Concepts of £)15 Dogmas. 

tainty of His destiny. Paul and his chain are 
but insignificant compared with Christ and 
His cross. No man on a forlorn hope ever 
bore his perilous mission half so jauntily as 
He with His eye illumined by the hope set 
before Him, in order that He might save. 

A newspaper criticism of a painting by 
Mr. Alexander Pope says : " The subject is 
chosen from Bulwer's scene in the ' Last 
Days of Pompeii/ when Glaucus is about to 
confront the lion in the arena, and when 
premonitions of the grand disturbance of nat- 
ure make the beast indifferent to the lesser 
conflict prepared for the sport of the popu- 
lace. The chief interest of the painting very 
properly centers upon the lion, since it was the 
instinct of the noble beast which changed the 
plot of the story, and which acted as a warn- 
ing to the great throng, intimating how small 
were men's jealousies and passions before 
the tremendous force which hurled the city 
unto destruction. Mr. Pope has endowed 
the lion with a grand indifference to the little 
part which he was set to play with Glaucus. 
Instead of facing his opponent, he has turned 
to look up toward the flame and smoke just 
issuing from the mountain ; and his action is 
so vivid that, although the mountain is not 



Cfye patience of Christ. 241 

seen in the painting, the spectator is aware of 
a serious disturbance upon the nature of the 
apprehensive beast. His head is raised, his 
front paw is not placed as firmly as usual, and 
his whole attitude expresses timidity without 
a loss of nobility and grandeur. " 

So all through passion week the Christ 
amidst the turmoil faced the great event to 
come, not with timid foot, but with a mien so 
fraught with the consciousness of destiny 
soon to be fulfilled, that His attitude of mind 
and heart obscured all else. What is Annas, 
or Caiaphas, or Pontius Pilate, or Mary and 
Peter and James, the Roman centurion, or the 
howling mob ? 

" Almighty and everlasting God, who, of 
Thy tender love toward mankind, hast sent 
Thy Son, our Saviour Jesus Christ, to take upon 
Him our flesh, and to suffer death upon the 
cross that all mankind should follow the ex- 
ample of His great humility ; mercifully grant, 
that we may both follow the example of His 
patience, and also be made partakers of His 
resurrection ; through the same Jesus Christ 
our Lord. Amen." 



16 



THE BASIS OF PRAYER. 

" Ye worship that which ye know not : we wor- 
ship that which we know. ' ' — John 4 : 22, 

TO worship in the Christian sense is to per- 
form acts of adoration ; while to adore is, 
first, to pay special and marked honors to 
God, and second, to regard Him with the ut- 
most esteem, affection, and respect. Heathen 
men lay less stress upon love than do Chris- 
tians, and found their worship upon power 
and the fear of power. We must recognize 
that comprehension of power is essential to 
adoration, but that it is not the only attribute 
necessary thereto. Who could worship an 
impotent God ? It would be possible to love 
God as the lover adores his fiancee — sim- 
ply as another person of agreeable quali- 
ties, and perchance with a hearty sense of 
comradeship. 

That, however, is not worship ; God in such 
circumstances is not above patronage. That 
Christian familiarity in prayer, momentarily 
forgetful of its disparity with the Infinite, often 
drops into descriptions of the Deity, is due to 
(242) 



tElje Basts of prayer. 243 

this fact, as if God did not know Himself. 
Again it often describes its own case with 
minuteness, as if the Godhead could not see 
all the thoughts and purposes of the heart 
without a microscope. And too often the in- 
tellect exhausts itself in a magnificent argu- 
ment, as if to an unwilling mind, and ends 
with an eloquent peroration both ecstatic and 
bewildering. From birth to death, Am I not 
a dependent being ? Can I breathe without 
His sustenance ? Can I live without His 
care ? Can I die except as He hath ordained ? 
With such constant dependence upon Him, 
man is ill-prepared, unless his eyes are 
closed to his real situation in God's world, to 
assume that he is sufficient unto himself in all 
things. " The avalanche is starting ; put 
down your staves through the snow-bank, 
hold for your lives ! " the guide may shout 
back to Alpine climbers below him ; and 
with an involuntary terror each one clenches 
his teeth and strikes the iron deeper. The 
next day, safe in his hospice, each recounts 
the dangers passed through and pathetically 
describes the instant when the soul was be- 
leagured by terrors. And shall the moral 
nature thus wince under the external fact of 
a higher law, and be unmoved if man shall 



244 Hem Concepts of £)16 Dogmas. 

know that God to whom the avalanche is no 
more than a snowball which boys have rolled 
in the damp snows to the foot of the hill, is 
moving against him, holding him reprobate 
and offensive ? 

Suppose a man from another planet, or a 
holy angel of God from heaven, should come 
to earth and learn of men? In Africa, on the 
grass lands about the great lakes, he might 
find the Wahuma an Ethiopian or Abyssinian 
stock, and among their varied pursuits of 
peace and war he would notice an egg or 
banana or kid skin placed at the door of a 
miniature temple always found at the en- 
trance of the group of family huts which are 
surrounded by a wattled fence. "Then, too, 
every person," says Henry M. Stanley, " wears 
a charm around the neck, or arm, or waist ;" 
the one being a temple for the abode of a 
dread deity, the other a protection from su- 
perhuman personalities who otherwise might 
maim, disease, or destroy. Or suppose the 
foot should first tread on Indian soil, there 
would be found altars before shrines in which 
the gods do dwell, altars of sacrifice unto su- 
pernatural spirits who are sometimes given 
image within in such grotesque form as shall 
shadow forth his unusual and hence god-like 



0?e Basis of Prayer. 245 

qualities. " Every town in the most relig- 
ious province of India" is filled with temples, 
and every hamlet has its shrine. The na- 
tional reverence of the Hindus for holy places 
has been for ages concentrated on " the city 
of Puri, sacred to Vishnu, the lord of the 
world." The same is true of all antiquity. 
Hardly a race of men is to be found that 
does not show a worshipful spirit based upon 
consciousness of dependence. 

From man's situation he argues with only 
such revelation as is given him in a state of 
nature, that there is a source of life and 
power in all the earth about him. To assist 
in making the existence of his deity real 
he fashions the idol, and at length cannot 
see why the wood or stone which he has 
placed in the shrine is not the vehicle of the 
God who was worshiped in the shrine before 
the idol was fashioned, and who, becoming 
identified with the place, he thinks must be 
identified with the visible token of him fash- 
ioned as best the skillful hands of men about 
can create. 

You see the degrees of approach to a con- 
summate idolatry. God the all-powerful is 
in the world, its first cause and sustainer, 
a certain portion of which, His handiwork, 



246 HetD Concepts of £>16 Dogmas* 

may be set aside to His worship. On this we 
will build a temple. As this is the place of 
prayer and sacrifice, it becomes holy ; next 
the deity identified with the spot comes to 
be regarded as the deity on the spot ; then 
the idol in the temple becomes the object 
of the sacrifice without the temple, and god 
and idol are one to remotest generations. 
But behind it all and fundamental thereto 
is the consciousness of dependence on the 
part of the creature. 

There are many reasons why you and I are 
conscious of mystery behind life and nature 
due to the teachings of science, which has be- 
come a part of common knowledge ; but we 
are presenting those feelings common to 
human nature, which the savage recognizes 
in the bloody rites of his heathen ritual, and 
which a heritage of our humanity are accentu- 
ated by the reflective powers of the intellect 
using the facts of our nineteenth century en- 
dowment of knowledge. I think it is for this 
reason that men pray : they can get along 
without prayer, but man was made to pray, 
and prays as naturally as he breathes. Sticks 
and stones cannot pray, the brute beasts do 
not pray ; therefore how excellent is our her- 
itage. It is as a testimony to this native en- 



£fye Basts of prayer. 247 

dowment we quote the Rig Veda, the psalms 
of the Indian branch of our Aryan stock. 
" Whosoever scoffs at the prayer which we 
have made, may hot plagues come upon him, 
may the sky burn up that hater of Brahmans." 
Three births the Indian Aryans taught, — 
the birth into the world, the regeneration 
consequent upon religious duties, and the 
translation to the kingdom above when fire 
setting free the spirit, the body returned to 
the earth whence it had been derived. Then 
the friends standing around recited the words 
of the ritual, " As for his unborn part, do 
Thou, Lord, quicken it with Thy heat ; let 
Thy flame and Thy brightness quicken it ; 
convey it to the world of the righteous." 

There is something infinitely touching 
about a person in prayer. The worship of 
orientals was ordinarily expressed by kneel- 
ing and prostrating one's self before God. 
It must be an affecting sight when the Mus- 
sulman unrolls his carpet, faces toward the 
East, and prostrates himself before the Su- 
preme. I noticed in the Century for No- 
vember, 1890, a picture of a Buddhist priest 
already sixteen hundred miles on his journey, 
with eleven hundred more to cover before he 
should reach Lh'asa ; every two steps of the 



248 Hem Concepts of £)I6 Dogmas. 

way he set down the miniature altar, with its 
nosegays at either end, and its three burning 
joss sticks, and prostrating in the supposed 
direction of Lh'asa, did reverence to God, 
not knowing, perchance, like the Samaritan, 
whom he worshiped, yet his act of devotion 
is a silent testimony of the creature's sensi- 
bility of his dependence upon a higher power. 
This is man bowing down before God. If I 
should see him thus cheerfully devout, I 
should feel like kneeling with him ; trusting 
that I prayed more intelligently than he, yet 
conscious of the same fundamental impres- 
sions of my relations to the unseen Deity. 

Once I did enter into devotions in just 
this way, in the Notre Dame at Montreal. 
It was a stormy day ; men were praying all 
over the house, silent and motionless, rever- 
ent in mien, and devoutly giving the sign of 
the cross, and bowing before altar, image, 
and picture. I said, " I am a praying man 
too. I care not much for those great puffed- 
out, blood-burdened hearts under glass cases, 
with little red globes strung along the gas 
pipes in semi-circle above them, or those 
vases filled with dowdy artificial flowers ; 
but there is an incense of devotion going 
up, there is a recognition of the oversoul 



Cfye Basts of prayer. 249 

and human dependence. However great the 
superstition, there is worship. I will worship 
too, believing that God who seeth the heart 
of Papist and Protestant alike, will be well 
pleased." 

You all will remember the wonderful pict- 
ure called the Angelus. The attitude of that 
peasant man and woman is an attitude of 
prayer. In the distance a steeple rises above 
the horizon, but they are not listening to the 
silver tone of bells. You need not be told 
they are engaged in worship. The legend 
that ascribes the bell note as the signal for 
their devotion, is not needed in interpreta- 
tion. Whether bells are sounding in their 
ears, it is no matter ; they heed them not ; 
their souls are enwrapt. Consciousness of 
dependence has obtained recognition for a 
divine Guest, who will not turn His back in 
the half-opened door. All other sounds are 
banished, all other sights are dim ; one pres- 
ence illumines two hearth-rooms, and two 
spirits are prostrate in adoration. One 
almost hears the words, "Put off thy shoes 
from thy feet, for the place where thou 
standest is holy ground." The hundreds of 
thousands who have stood before that bit of 
canvass twenty-two inches in its widest part, 



250 ttem Concepts of £>lb Dogmas. 

and have lingered that its impression might 
grow beyond first sight effects, have sat con- 
scious that an impression unusual in this sen- 
sual, material age, has been infused into the 
dull pigments by the consecrated genius of 
the painter, so that they have become vocal 
with the thoughts and sentiments of a human 
heart prostrate before the throne of the King 
of kings. 

The atheist, with the spiritual and moral 
dullard, can only say, " What can this mean ?" 
but goes away touched on a side of nature 
never before awakened. To them, however, 
who have known the way of peace but have 
neglected the means of grace, and so have 
not walked in its ways, it is a sermon which 
preaches louder than a preacher's voice and 
more powerful than his pen. " Peace," he 
saith, " which others have and I have not, is 
found by the prayerful peasant who acknowl- 
edges God, being conscious of the strength 
of the right arm of the Omnipotent, and of 
his own dependence thereon." 

To the weary and tired there is a ministry 
in worship. For the tempted and the sick 
there is a trance which redeems the spirit 
from the dominion of the body, and makes 
a dying bed as soft as downy pillows are. 



£f?e Basts of prayer. 251 

Martyr after martyr gave up his life in the 
flame and smoke of death at the stake, and 
thought not of his pains, but only of the 
revelation of the Lord Jesus to his eyes, 
before whom his spirit prostrated itself on 
its knees, a service which the cords binding 
to the stake could not restrain. Huss died 
with the words of the supplication of the 
mass upon his lips, " O Lord, have mercy 
upon us." Green's shorter history of the 
English people says of the Marian persecu- 
tion, " Rogers, . . . one of the foremost 
among the Protestant preachers, died bath- 
ing his hands in the flame, as if it had been 
in cold water. Even the commonest lives 
gleamed for a moment into poetry at the 
stake. ' Pray for me/ a boy, William Brown, 
who had been brought home to Brentwood 
to suffer, asked of the bystanders round. *I 
will pray no more for thee/ one of them re- 
plied, ' than I will pray for a dog.' ' Then/ 
said William, * Son of God, shine upon me/ 
and immediately the sun in the elements 
shone out of a dark cloud so full in his face 
that he was constrained to look another way." 
To us who are Christians has been vouch- 
safed fullness of knowledge. Through the 
Jews has come one Christ, the revealer in His 



252 Hem Concepts of £)16 Dogmas. 

person of the mind, heart, and temper of 
God. One with all men in conscious need 
of worship, we of all npien have fullness of 
knowledge alone shared by the Christian 
centuries. Let us worship God less and less 
as we may good naturedly treat a neighbor 
or friend of whom we ask a kindness with 
good will and something of fawning ; but 
rather with consciousness of dependence in 
manly recognition of the oversoul, let us 
worship as the prelude to petition, as con- 
comitant to service, and as the end of all 
striving, God's recognition of us being our 
hope and our glory. 



THE LIFE BURDEN A PRAYER. 

" Remember me, O my Lord, and wipe not out 
my good deeds that I have done for the house 
of my God and for the offices thereof." — 
Neh. i j : 14. 

NEHEMIAH, you will remember, was the 
great leader who brought back the fifty- 
thousand exiles from Persia, and re-estab- 
lished the Israelitish name in its ancient 
seats. When the walls had been rebuilt 
about Jerusalem, the prime necessity for trade 
and personal security being accomplished, he 
gave himself to the extirpation of heathen 
practices among the people, and to the re- 
establishment of the pure worship of Jehovah. 
Three times in this chapter, and once else- 
where, he asks God's remembrance of him 
for what he had done. These were the 
climactic acts of his career ; he had gained 
the permission of the mighty Cyrus, and per- 
formed the long march at the head of the 
emigrants, refortified the city, and done all 
that he might bring a transplanted nation 
and priesthood back into impact with the 
heavenly King. In view of these last acts 

(253) 



254 Heir) Concepts of £)16 Dogmas. 

crowning his whole labor, his cry is, " Re- 
member me, O my God, for good." This is a 
breathing out of the heart of the man. The 
labors of a lifetime he offers up ; conscious of 
his singleness of purpose and of the service 
he has been able to render, he asks that his 
works may plead for him, and that the great 
acts of his life may stand as memorials of 
what he did, each one a reminder to the eter- 
nal Spirit and appealing to the love of the 
divine Heart. 

" Ah ! " says some one, " Nehemiah is lay- 
ing down on the counter the price he would 
pay for himself, as a slave under the old 
regimen might redeem his freedom with the 
wages of his slavery. And as the first words 
of bill of sale of the freedman granted 
mastery over his body unto himself, so with 
similar conception the man of God is pur- 
chasing himself of his God for his own selfish 
ends, is gaining mastery for himself through 
purchase, * Remember, O Lord, my works, 
and grant me good/ " Now the preacher is 
aware that no man is equal to the task of 
his own redemption, and that it is through 
God's love that we are saved, and that our 
justification must be through the merits of 
a matchless personality. But justification 



£fye £tfe Burben a prayer. 255 

by faith is one thing, and the return of love 
by the creature justified is another. It is 
one thing to rest assured of the pardon of 
God, and another thing to accept that par- 
don in penitence and taking heart to mould 
one's character over after the model of Him 
who needed no repentance. This second 
act of putting one's self right with God is 
by no means conflicting with that conscious- 
ness of personal ill-desert and acceptance of 
God's scheme of redemption. This attitude 
of Nehemiah may be called Old Testament 
legalism, or salvation by works, or any other 
name ; to me it appears to be a noble peti- 
tion, worthy of any devout nature, ancient 
or modern. 

A Christian woman, speaking of missions 
in my hearing, said, " The burden of the 
Christian as one advances is changed into 
prayer," and then corrected herself adding, 
u Rather, the burden of the Christian is 
changed into wings." The first statement 
had made its impression upon me, and I 
could not forget it. Ah ! yes, I said, I 've 
seen, it so many a time. A mother, to re- 
claim an erring child, will pamper his ap- 
petite with food to his taste ; will gratify 
his whim in little things about the house ; 



256 Hern Concepts of £)lb Dogmas* 

will plead with father that he may not be so 
stern with the boy ; with dear, affectionate 
lips will coax the wanderer, will think of him 
much, however recreant may be his life, and 
will pray for him with travail of heart. Does 
not the burden of that life become trans- 
formed by the load of its passion, the passion 
of a weak human heart ? Does not its bur- 
den, so willingly borne, become a mightier 
prayer than any faltering petition that the 
mother heart can frame from tremulous lips ? 
Does not the life with its burden avail more 
mightily with God than the mere prayers of 
a million men ? Christ is set forth in the 
Scriptures as at the right hand of the 
Majesty on high, our intercessor. Do you 
think that the nature of His intercession 
is continual request for our help? or do 
our prayers receive the indorsement of His 
wounded hands and side, seals of His passion 
and sign manuals of His burden of redemp- 
tion, eternally made a prayer, and never lack- 
ing in potency to the heart of the Father ? 

There was a general in the East who 
enlisted in the war of the Rebellion, was 
frightfully maimed, and received his dis- 
charge from the hospital a mere trunk, as I 
remember the story. He soon sent word to 



Cfye £tfe Burben a prayer* 257 

his fiance, releasing her from her pledge, 
which release she promptly refused. YoiTsee 
it was not the wording of his petition, but 
the burden of his life, that made the prayer 
which touched. She said there was more in 
him as he was than in any man she knew. If 
human kind are thus moved, is it too much to 
believe that God is won more by the master- 
motive of a life which culminates in a shat- 
tered body, and of which this is a witness of 
unspeakable power, mightier far than any 
voiced aspiration of the heart in the lip-serv- 
ice prayer ? We had a boy in college who 
lived across the river and walked in to his 
recitations. Nobody that knew him could 
help respecting him, but so much was ex- 
pected of him in manual labor on the farm, 
and he scrimped so much on clothing, that 
we thought him rather a light weight. He 
did not have the chance to study as the 
rest of us did. As he progressed in his 
professional studies, we were conscious of 
a vast development, and in the flower of 
his youth and culture he gave himself (the 
deacon's best gift to the Lord) to Foreign 
Missions, and was assigned to Mexico. Be- 
fore fully acclimated, while worn down with 
his studies, he took the small-pox and died. 
17 



258 Hem Concepts of 2)16 Dogmas. 

As the spirit of the boy left his swollen, pu- 
triti flesh, would you call it legalism or work 
righteousness had he exclaimed, " Remember 
me, O my God, concerning this, and wipe not 
out my good deeds that I have done for the 
house of my God and the offices thereof" ? 
Could not his poor body, as representing the 
burden of his life, speak louder than all his 
prayers, had he lived a thousand years in a 
monastery apart and given his whole strength 
to prayer and devotion ? 

We pray by choice, that is for chance ob- 
jects. We happen to think of somebody, and 
word of petition follows. We surprise our- 
selves often in the new objects that of a sud- 
den appear to us for prayer and the persons 
for whom we pray. Now no prayer is lost, 
and I would encourage you to pray irration- 
ally, for we must pray all ways, with all 
manner of weakness and spiritual poverty, 
that we may enter into the true blessedness 
of prayer ; but do not lay too much stress upon 
it. When sportsmen shoot aimlessly, they 
shoot into the air. When you pray aimlessly, 
you often pray from feeling, and never coun- 
ter to the spirit of your life, pray as you would 
not have prayed had you thought upon it. 
Which prayer shall God answer, the prayer of 



Cfye £tfe Burben a Prayer. 259 

the Up, or the prayer of the life's burden ? 
Which do you want answered ? Is it not the 
prayer of the life-burden, after all ? And as 
you stand to-day looking back upon your 
life, do not the failures to answer chance pe- 
titions seem trifling one way or the other ? 
Do you not know that the final petition, the 
asking of your deepest desire, bearing the 
sum of all your petitions, their very sub- 
stance, is found in the burden of the life ? 

We may pray for our wants, which seem 
as multitudinous and varied as those con- 
tained in the advertising columns of the 
daily press, and pray for our needs, all of 
which are solid, real things to us, and there 
may be no more doubt about our truly de- 
siring the things asked than of our neces- 
sity ; but such petitions, emphatically ours, 
inconsiderately ours, in which we ask wealth 
for ourselves and no one else, health for us 
and our children, for the gratification of our 
ambitions, that our pleasures may be unob- 
structed and receive the blessing of Heaven, 
couched in worshipful and respectful terms 
toward God, they are importunate and 
Scriptural, for they follow the rule, but 
do we expect them answered ? There is 
every human need in them but soul hun- 



260 Heto Concepts of £)lb Dogmas, 

ger, every objective but the good of others, 
every passion but the passion for holiness, 
every moral thing but equity, every love 
but love for Christ, simple and sincere ; 
and such a clamor for blessing we call 
prayer ! And it is a kind of prayer. But 
if my soul is in peril, and eternal destiny 
hangs upon mortal issues for me, God grant 
that my life may be involved within the 
sphere of action of another life in which such 
lip-service has only a minor place, and the 
life is a constant burden of doing good ; 
when the ruling passion is the travail of 
Christ for the rescue of a human soul to 
ways of life, and when the soul is given to 
paths of duty, and God is great beyond com- 
pare to one consciousness, and His purpose 
supreme law to one will. For I know that 
such a person, whether humble or great, 
hath power with God for greater than lip- 
service, the burden is transformed into 
prayer, a constant reminder of a motive such 
as dwells in angels' bosoms. I believe such 
a person can alter the course of Orion and 
the Pleiades, change the movement of human 
destinies by his own petition, and by his own 
prayers alone transform those human socie- 



Cfye £tfe Burben a prayer. 261 

ties we call nations, and lift up all civilization 
nearer God. 

Of the salvation of the individual by a life 
burden made a prayer, I cite the rescue of 
John B. Gough from a drunkard's cups 
through the prayful endeavors of his wife. 
Of the salvation of a nation by the life burden 
made a prayer, I cite the revolution of Scot- 
land by John Knox. Of the^ uplifting of 
human civilization by a life-burden made a 
prayer, I cite the wonderful influence of 
Christopher Columbus, through the discovery 
of America, upon European Christendom. As 
Columbus lay in the hold of the ship, return- 
ing a captive to the Spain he had endowed, 
the victim of ingratitude, oppressed and over- 
thrown by a stupendous wickedness and 
malice, I believe that by reason of the burden 
he so pathetically and proudly bore it be- 
came transformed into a petition of the 
mighty soul that moved the heart of God ; 
and that when, in addition to the mute peti- 
tion of the life, Columbus prayed, 1 all Heaven 
heard the whisperings of human lips, and 

1 Oi Columbus we are told: "So strict in religious 
matters, that for fasting and saying all the divine office, 
he might be thought professed in some religious order." 



262 £tero Concepts of £)16 Dogmas. 

Christ saw the travail of His soul and was 
satisfied, and the Father and the Son were at 
one with each other. Which was the greater 
honor, to discover a new world, or to have 
the burden of the life changed into prayer? 
Which ? 



A VALID REDEMPTION. 

" As Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilder- 
ness ', even so must the Son of man be lifted 
up : that whosoever believeth may in Him 
have eternal life." — John j ; 14, 13. 

A FEW years ago, in one of the large fac- 
tory towns in New Hampshire, a little 
French boy met with an accident which 
necessitated medical assistance. His skull 
was stoven in at a given point ; during the 
painful operations of the surgeon he sat 
unmovable and calm, without an anaesthetic 
and with nothing to help him bear the 
anguish save only a diminutive cross and the 
image on it, rude but suggestive of Him 
who bore our sorrows in His own body 
on the tree. That medical operator was 
a sincere and devoted Protestant, and his 
assistant, a man of similar views, shared his 
principal's conviction that the boy's faith 
helped him in his extremity. 

Protestant theology also uses this symbol 
as a stimulus and help to man in his ex- 
tremity. We point the eyes of the dying to 
the cross which was raised upon Calvary, 

(263) 



264 Xievo Concepts of £)lb Dogmas. 

that it may be to them like the brazen ser- 
pent in the wilderness to the stricken Israel- 
ite, — a source of healing and recovery. We 
do not offer the crucifix, because we fear 
that it may become an object of idolatry ; 
that instead of finding in the smaller cross 
a remembrance of the true cross, it may 
come to be the all, an object of reverence 
and a fixture accessory to the incantations 
of devotion, in the prayers of the rosary. 
We say with Knox, in his Scottish fervor, 
It is a bit of painted wood ; but we wel- 
come the faith that survives the appeal to 
the external senses, and which, beyond the 
sympathy which the image of suffering may 
produce, has in its consciousness that cross 
of Calvary, as an object of faith. 

This may be readily explained. You pass 
a person suffering bodily anguish, and your 
heart goes out to him, but that is not an act 
of the religious sensibilities ; true, the man 
or woman without pity is less religious than 
the person with it, but there is no distinct 
moral impression which makes a man hate 
sin or brings him into peace with God. Thus 
in so far as the crucifix brings up to the mind 
merely the bodily suffering of the Lord Jesus, 
it is no help to faith ; but in so far as that 



2t Valxb Kebemption. 265 

crucifix or your thought and my thought of 
Calvary pervades the consciousness with the 
idea of Christ on the cross as a sacrifice of the 
sins of humanity, or as an atonement by 
means of which reconciliation is possible be- 
tween God and man, or as the most potent 
example of the moral power of self-abnega- 
tion, constrained by the power of which 
exemplar men in all ages are led to resist 
"even unto blood, striving against sin," in 
so far the cross becomes what Jesus said it 
should in our text, namely, a means of the 
purification of man's heart, of the transforma- 
tion of man's motive, of the salvation of man's 
soul. This is the bed rock of Christendom ; 
here is to be found all that is worth having in 
the old church or the new. 

We do not deny that immortality is a great 
doctrine, but immortality hinges on the 
death of Christ ; we do not deny that ethics 
is a great topic, but we say the highest ethics 
and the best morality must recognize in the 
suffering Redeemer the profoundest moral 
experience ever witnessed upon earth. Hu- 
man philosophy attains its highest levels 
only when it explains the relation of the 
Crucified to the redemption of humanity, 
justifying the claim of theology to be es- 



266 Hem Concepts of £>lb Dogmas. 

teemed queen of the sciences. Human life 
is never apprehended in its true dignity until 
it is seen to be worthy the sacrifice of the 
highest of uncreated beings, the sufferings 
and sin of human beings causing Deity to 
suffer as the only possible means of re- 
demption. 

Suppose we listen to the wild cry of the 
mob, and strike Christ's true cross out of 
Christian belief; once more the heathen age 
returns when man, and man only, is a cosmic 
fact, and God or gods are mere possibilities 
to the imagination of dreamers. How de- 
graded would seem the poverty of man's 
endowment ! how base the flights of his pur- 
est imagination ! how ignoble his physical 
constitution ! how worthless the boon of 
existence ! Christ without the cross is a 
Socrates ; Christ with the cross is God in- 
carnated in human flesh. Christ without 
the cross is a moral personality of superior 
intentions as to duty and righteousness ; 
Christ with the cross is the exemplification 
to remotest ages and all mankind of the 
verity of eternal justice, that there is no 
forgiveness of sin unless the punishment of 
transgression meets its due reward. Christ 
without the cross resigns mankind to be 



31 Valxb Hebemptton. 267 

smitten by its appetencies, leaves it cradled 
in crime to grow up into criminality ; Christ 
with the cross raises human character from 
ruin and degradation, and establishes holi- 
ness in human hearts. We mean to claim, in 
other words, that human society is revolu- 
tionized by the doctrines of the cross ; that 
it brings into touch, if you please, with 
human experience, ideas and ideals other- 
wise unknown and strange. This we think is 
admitted on all hands, the difference of view t 
of feeling, of passion, and of love, which is 
illustrated in a man who has never heard the 
gospel, and the same man when he has heard 
it proclaimed, or, better, when he has ac- 
cepted it, and made it his own. 

Here we are met by the objections, "But 
the cross which the church holds up is a 
fiction." " Christ did die, but dead, his death 
avails not ; the atonement, the sacrifice, the 
reconciliation, mean nothing. We believe 
in facts, the church believes in fancy's dream, 
cleanse thy body of superstitions, and we will 
receive the church evangel." We beg to 
differ with such voices. True, the cross is 
a symbol, but it must be more significant 
than the many myriads of crosses which 
bore more or less guilty men under judg- 



268 Hem Concepts of £>16 Dogmas. 

ments of the Roman law, the world over, 
during the reign of the imperial city of the 
Caesars. But we affirm that the symbol- 
ism of the cross is no greater than the 
symbolism of ordinary life. Take an ob- 
jector who deals exclusively with facts, and 
who objects to the ideality of the Christian 
religion. I warrant he may be living upon a 
property which for fifty years has been dwelt 
upon by his race, and that he can show no 
deed because his inheritance is one of un- 
broken possession. But why does that posses- 
sion come down to his remote generation ? 
Simply because that ancestor fifty or a hun- 
dred years before did symbolic things ; that 
is, lived there, took possession, staked out his 
claim, cultivated. 

He may not have done so much upon the 
property as others upon their homesteads, he 
may not have been so needy or so deserving, 
yet the symbolism of his act holds the estate, 
and it descends securely to each remotest 
generation of his descendants. Perhaps our 
friend holds a mortgage upon the land of his 
neighbor ; he doubtless is not sorry to be the 
possessor of such an instrument, but it is 
merely the symbol of money paid and the 
consequent rights to principal and interest 



2t Valxb Kebemptkm. 269 

investing in him, for which the whole prop- 
erty may be held until at length, the equity 
becoming worthless, he takes possession. 
His symbol by that act is proven worth more 
than his neighbor's fact. The symbol has 
swallowed it up, and, if the first possessor is 
recalcitrant, in the hands of the sheriff vindi- 
cates very soon its right to be considered a 
potentiality in human affairs. A store ac- 
count, the deposition of a witness living or 
dead, a last will and testament, the decree of 
a court, the proclamation of our president, all 
are instances of the effectual use of symbolism 
in human affairs. The late dying emperor of 
Germany, unable to qualify as ruler by taking 
the oath of office, was compelled to affirm in 
writing that he would as soon as he were 
able, and though his ability could never 
come, the symbol stood for the act, and he 
was both a crowned and uncrowned king. 

But the best illustration of all is in the cur- 
rency of the United States. Our bank bills 
and treasury notes are good, lawful money ; 
in and of themselves they are worth just what 
they will bring as old paper or as curiosities ; 
but representing dollars in gold, they will 
everywhere procure the necessities and luxu- 
ries of life. Nothing is too cheap to be be- 



270 Xicw Concepts of £)lb Dogmas. 

yond their reach, and no work of art hallowed 
by the signature of a genius, and no gem 
bright with the radiance of God's handiwork 
discovered and developed by miner and lapi- 
dary, is so choice that they may not buy it. 
And yet they are only symbols of the real 
value contained in a gold coin of standard 
weight and fineness. Methinks the most 
matter-of-fact man is willing to fill his wallet 
with them ; he does not insist on bullion 
rather than bills, that he may have more to 
do with realities. The world's business could 
not be done without notes of this sort, and 
checks and similar business paper. The man, 
therefore, who refuses to accept the cross as 
a symbol of Christ's death upon it and of his 
mediatorial and reconciliatory work, in con- 
sistency should refuse bank notes, and go 
about weighted down with gold coin. 

Indeed, we may push the same illustra- 
tion further. What is gold ? Well, it is the 
only yellow metal ; it is the most malleable 
and ductile metal. Very thin leaves appear 
yellow by reflected light, and green by trans- 
mitted light ; and when heated, the trans- 
mitted light is ruby red. One grain may be 
drawn into a wire 500 feet long. It is of use 
in jewelry, particularly as furnishing, when 



7X Valxb Xebemptton, 271 

alloyed, a strong and beautiful setting for 
precious stones. From most ancient times 
it has been made a standard of value, like 
the shells known as wampum among the 
North American Indians. In the remains 
of most ancient peoples, along the shores 
of the Mediterranean Sea, together with 
beautiful ornaments, the style of which the 
modern goldsmiths are to-day reproducing, 
are discovered the nuggets rudely stamped 
with the seal of dynasty or of metropolis, 
the coin of that remote day. But gold will 
not shield the back from winter's blasts ; 
it will not pacify the stomach gnawed by 
hunger or parched with thirst. It could be 
dispensed with so far as the actual supply of 
man's needs is concerned. It is, in other 
words, merely the symbol of the world's 
wealth, the something into which all values 
can be converted, and of peculiar fitness for 
its sphere because it is hard to obtain, the 
supply keeping down better than that of any 
other metal, so that it is not cheapened by 
surplusage. Every pound of tobacco, every 
gallon of molasses, every commodity of com- 
merce, every inch of real property, submits 
to this standard for the determination of 
its value. Is it any wonder, then, that the 



272 Hetp Concepts of £)15 Dogmas. 

church cannot understand why its reality- 
should be tainted by the charge of fiction ? 
For one, conscious of my weakness, with 
evil ever present with me when trying to do 
well, with the best of my purposes not wholly 
clear from evil influence, I find in the cross 
the symbol of my redemption, and I draw 
healing and blessing from the acceptance of 
its sacrifice, as completely sufficient to atone 
for my lack and my transgression, believing 
that, " as Moses lifted up the serpent in the 
wilderness, even so must the Son of man be 
lifted up, that whosoever believeth, may in 
Him have everlasting life." This is the stand- 
ard of holiness ; this is the atonement for 
transgression ; this is the pledge of life eter- 
nal ; this is the means of salvation in a lost 
and ruined world ; this is the symbol of God's 
sacrifice for sin. 



YET SHALL I LIVE. 

" Though he were dead, yet shall he live. 19 — 
John ii : 25. 

HOWEVER poorly the Christian world 
has assimilated the moral teachings of 
Christ, hardly less striking is the failure of 
mankind to enter into the great birthright 
of immortality, revelation concerning which is 
contained in the Christian Scriptures. It is 
a pleasure that all communions are recogniz- 
ing this great festival of the Christian year, 
which pertains to no church in particular, but 
to the church universal, its observance dating 
from the very resurrection itself, and being 
a blessed reminder of the hopes bound up in 
Him who hath ascended to the right hand of 
God the Father. To the soul that believes that 
He lives, how can this life ever sink down out 
of the sense of privilege and responsibility 
resultant from apprehension of immortality ? 
Better that the right hand lose its cunning 
than that the creature live for his day-dream 
and passion, his eyes able to see naught 
above him, his thought able to engross noth- 
18 (273) 



274 Hem Concepts of £)lb Dogmas. 

ing beyond this present time. While the 
word of Christ is a pledge of certainty, the 
loss of which would be the loss of all absolute 
assurance, the human heart rejoices when the 
human reason is able to develop arguments 
pointing to aptitude and capacities harmoni- 
ous with the conception of a life to come, a 
continuation and culmination of the life that 
now is. 

Every person is impressed with the inherent 
life of the planet. Men live and die, it 
matters not who has been, only who is. The 
most magnificently endowed body in an in- 
stant becomes a perishable remnant, brother 
of the insensible clod. This present life is a 
continuous wave of existence ; what now is 
of humanity is the present possession of a 
phenomenon we call life. If all ages were 
allotted to a zone on a great sphere, each 
of which, when it came under the sun- 
light in its slow revolution, sprang into life, 
all things behind being dead, all things in 
the future being a creative possibility await- 
ing conditions of life, we should have a good 
illustration of the impression which life in 
the abstract makes upon the human mind. 
Striking God out, we say animate nature 
lives ; but we do not know how it lives. 



get Sfall 3 Ctee. 275 

Studying conditions and environment, we 
cannot learn the secret of life, we only know 
that it is. 

It is not strange, therefore, that in all ages 
there have been some who have said, " All I 
am conscious of is this life phase in which I 
exist. Moreover, men about me seem moved 
by the same impulses that I am ; the highest 
offices of religion do not reach the masses. I 
go with the bulk of the life in my time. 
Everything about my personality I conclude 
is consequent upon life." We would remind 
you, first, that this is an observation of per- 
sonal identity. We do as others do, we are 
the victims of circumstance ; we will live and 
die ; life is all and death ends all. When this 
doctrine comes to scientific statement, there 
is nothing but matter in heaven or earth ; 
thought, memory, aspiration, are all products 
of molecular action, like the heat generated 
tinder chemical combinations. And the bur- 
den of the siren-song is, " Man, thou art not 
immortal ; thy hopes are perishable ; turn 
thy face away from the heavens ; thy birth- 
right to immortality is a dream." 

Recall that man you knew well of old. 
There is not a particle of the same creature 
in him there was thea; yet you take him by 



276 Hem Concepts of £>lb Dogmas* 

the hand, the same finger is gone that was 
then lacking ; you look into his eyes, they 
are not the same, but they look the same ; 
his face is wrinkled, but you tell him it has 
the old look ; the voice is not the same, but 
you would have known it anywhere ; and 
mentally you find the same characteristics, 
though somewhat changed. Now in all the 
changes of the years has there not been a 
law of personal identity running through all ? 
That body and spirit are some way or other 
wrapped up in one personality. You read 
his books, and you hold him responsible ; 
you take his note, and you hold him to ac- 
count ; you see him in a court of law, and 
you charge the debt upon him, and you re- 
fuse to allow him to prove that he is not 
responsible. Let him commit crime, and 
you trace through years his vicious courses, 
and hold him up to the execration of man- 
kind. That is, behind all change there is a 
reign of law, which reaches out into a certain 
domain and assimilates earth, air, food, and 
water into a certain reign of consciousness 
which we call personal existence. I will be 
more explicit ; there is a life principle in 
each human being which takes light, air, 
food, and drink, and devotes it to the con- 



Set S^all 3 Ctoe. 277 

struction, maintenance, and repair of a par- 
ticular body ; it ministers to nothing else in 
the world ; everything that comes from the 
outside must minister to it or be untouched. 
You may pile a thousand barrels of flour 
at your front door, but this life principle can 
only assimilate a certain quantity such as 
it may take through the body it inhabits. 
Every ray of light, every blow, every thought, 
every convulsion of nature, has certain ave- 
nues of impression, but this ministry from 
without is limited by the capacity of the life 
principle to receive. It matters not if there 
are oceans of water, but it has not a drop to 
drink ; or if the world is bathed in sunlight, 
so long as clouds are overhead. This per- 
sonal miracle of life thus breaks in upon the 
phenomenon of life at large. 

II. Turning scrutiny within, we there find 
evidence of the same identity. We have 
changed, like our friends, but we know that 
the hand which to-day clasps the hand of 
friend, is the same that long ago plighted 
troth and friendship ; however much may 
have been the changes in its physical make 
up, it is our hand now and it was our hand 
then, and no constraint of certainty compels 
us to move it one way or that, only the self- 



278 Hem Concepts of £>lb Dogmas, 

determinations of personal identity having 
had ought to do therewith. 

III. Further : that power to think known 
to each of us is proof that we are ; and this 
proof is not merely a present consciousness ; 
it registers its present acts, and makes them 
a matter of reference for the future. No man 
writing down in ink some transaction of to- 
day, has a safer record than you and I have 
of certain acts which had great dramatic 
power on us, — dramatic, I say, because or- 
dinary events we do not care to treasure ; a 
terrible scene of bloodshed haunts the living 
to the death ; an unwonted sorrow never dies. 
An old love may be imperishable ; there may 
be mothers in this congregation who treasure 
the little things of a child long dead. Men 
have been through the hell of war, or the 
great excitements of politics, which have left 
within them photographic scenes which can 
be called up by memory and presented. 

IV. If in power of thought we find argu- 
ment for identity, much more in memory. 
Amid all the changes of our life, what thing 
has remained constant to serve as the nega- 
tive of past scenes by means of which the 
past is thus preserved, representation of 
which, vivid and truthful, we may reproduce 



get Siiall 3 £tpc. 279 

at will ? That this is contained in molecules 
of the brain, an inconstant substance con- 
stantly undergoing change, is impossible ; 
and when you give capacity to transfer an 
idea from one molecule to another, you have 
given the power of personal identity. Let 
me clinch the argument a little ; the molecule 
of the brain is the factor in reproducing im- 
pressions of things concerning which it can 
have no knowledge of itself, because they 
took place before it was in existence. Plainly, 
therefore, there is something in living rela- 
tions with the molecule, capable of transfer- 
ring from one molecule to another, impres- 
sions which it has derived from one alone. A 
man faints away ; molecule and atom remain 
in his brain cells, but where is thought ? 
Dead or dormant, surely, for when he comes 
out of it, reason awakes. The power to think 
has remained somewhere while the life of the 
body has gone on ; now where, I ask, was it ? 
How can a molecule have one moment the 
power of thought and one moment not ? 
Plainly the power of thought has relations 
with the molecule, but is not that molecule. 
Again : to take a well-authenticated instance : 
A laborer was struck by a falling brick, and 
was rendered insensible. When he recovered 



280 Tttvo Concepts of £)R> Dogmas. 

consciousness, he finished the sentence which 
was interrupted when the accident occurred. 
The functions of the body were broken off, 
and the real thinking power was held in leash 
until the relations could be re-established be- 
tween body and spirit. Plainly, there is 
something behind the body which flesh and 
blood is not heir to, which hath a kingdom of 
its own, and which has relations to the flesh 
for reasons of convenience only. Again : a 
person dies from a stroke of lightning, or is 
drowned ; there seems no mutilation of the 
body, but in spite of molecular immobility 
the capacity for thought has gone. Some- 
thing greater than the body was here, some- 
thing that used the body, something over 
which the body had no control, without which 
the body cannot protect itself from dissolu- 
tion. 

Being therefore so all important, holding 
as it does the key of the centrifugal forces 
which pull together the microcosm we call 
the body, is it strange that Christian men 
hold that the truly essential life is that which 
has gone, or that, impressed with the argu- 
ment drawn from personal identity, they 
have believed that through the transplanta- 
tion of that mysterious hidden fire of being is 



!?et Sfall 3 £toe. 281 

found the true explanation of the doctrine of 
the immortality of the human soul ? Is it 
any harder for the human spirit to energize 
a new body in the glorified state of heaven, 
transferring itself from its present energizing 
vocation in the human organism, than for it 
to transfer its spiritual and sensual impres- 
sions, that is, its thoughts and recollections of 
places and occasions, from the molecules of 
the brain, its officer and servant, of fifty 
years ago, to the molecules of the brain of 
to-day ? Fifty years ago I saw something ; 
the eyes that saw it are gone, the brain that 
registered the sensory impressions of the 
nerves of the eye is gone ; that was fifty years 
ago. On the new brain of to-day my inner 
self brings up that old impression, and I see 
it in my mind's eye again. I say that gap of 
fifty years thus o'erleaped is as great as the 
gap between the life that now is, and that 
which is to come, and that the energization 
of the new molecule of the brain fiber and 
reproduction of sensory impressions is as 
great as the energization of a glorified body 
and the reproduction of sensory impressions 
in the land beyond the swelling floods. With 
throbbing heart, therefore, in the presence of 
the awfulness of death, dilating with the 



282 Hem Concepts of £>lb Dogmas. 

hopes of a man for immortality, gathering in 
the testimony which my personal identity 
gives to the feasibility of that hope, I accept 
the word of my Master, and believe with the 
assurance of faith that though I shall die, yet 
shall I live. 



HE IS RISEN. 

"He is not here; for he is risen." — Matt. 
28:6. 

THE opening sentence of the collect for 
Easter Sunday — " Almighty God, who 
through Thine only begotten Son, Jesus 
Christ, hast overcome death, and opened 
unto us the gate of everlasting life" — is a 
wonderful sentence, wonderful as pure lim- 
pid English, the glorious, chaste, and beauti- 
ful tongue to which we were born ; wonderful 
as pregnant with thought so copious that 
volumes could be written upon it ; and as an 
exact statement of Bible teaching in unin- 
spired words, presenting in freshest way 
Scripture thought. This collect ends as our 
text, and leaves us gazing into eternity. 

I was born, says one, amid the hills ; love 
nourished me, and I grew. I do not know 
anything about it, only that in the blackness 
of the night that shrouded my being, lumin- 
ous points appeared, here a love, there an 
experience, again a knowledge which might 
better be termed a consciousness. The one 

(283) .. 



284 Heu> Concepts of £)16 Dogmas. 

was the love which is nurtured in the home. 
It can have no introduction to you ; your 
hearts have been swayed by it, and must 
be so long as God gives you reason and 
existence. 

Another luminous point against the back- 
ground of that forgetfulness out of which we 
sprang into our mother's arms, is what I 
might call world-consciousness ; for it grows 
to that. It begins in the sense of touch ; 
however, we cannot trace it thus far; we 
learn to trust our instincts at first just as 
honey bees somehow learn to soar aloft and 
line straight for the hive. But there comes, 
by and by, the luminous point when we be- 
gin to mentally register conceptions of what 
we see, what we hear, what we feel and smell ; 
this grows, but we remember its beginning. 
The third luminous point grows out of con- 
trast between life and the unknown, some 
experience which, across the brightness and 
sunshine of our living, casts the shadow of 
a power, which, when it strikes, strikes to 
maim and destroy. It is shrouded at first, 
so that we do not understand that it is 
natural law and that it worketh death ; but 
it plunges the iron of a nameless dread into 
the soul. When we are blown off our feet 



£}e 3s Htsem 285 

by cyclones, and hug the ground in terror, 
or when we nearly drown, the memory of our 
minutes of clutching at grass roots, vainly 
trying to pull ourselves out, and the seconds 
when we are under water before the air 
bladder of the lungs brings us to the sur- 
face, these photographed on the memory, 
ever bring up the same first luminous notions 
of things. From the first we have appetites 
and we learn to know passions. 

Look at those pictures in the illustrated 
magazines, of abject slaves and their savage 
black masters. Tears must fill the eyes of 
the philanthropist as he thinks of the poor 
children of Africa being hurried away by the 
inhuman mastiffs that guard them, to the sea- 
coast under incredible hardships and direful 
miseries. They, too, have had the dawning 
of reason ; they, too, are men ; they, too, 
have had the luminous points arise to this 
mental vision ; and have had their horizon 
enlarge. But their horizon is not yours, 
their loves are not yours, their knowledge 
is not yours. How mighty the force of cir- 
cumstances to crush the weak ! On the other 
hand, witness the arrogance of the captors. 
See the predominance of bestial character- 
istics, the weakness of the moral and spiritual 



286 Hett) Concepts of £>16 Dogmas. 

nature, the high ardor of their cruelty. They 
have the air of men who die in their calling 
if to achieve their ends death is necessary ; 
but their calling is jnan stealing ; the sorrows 
of others are their meat and drink. Does 
the invincible human courage raise the abo- 
riginal races of the dark continent ? Is it not 
rather used to render more complete the ab- 
jectness of man's ignorance, the misery of his 
estate by nature ? 

What makes the difference between them 
and us ? The stereotyped answer is, Civiliza- 
tion ! Yes, a very noble answer. For in- 
stance, notice the civilization of the Indian at 
the West. He is a drunken, lazy brute, 
always drinking the white man's whisky, 
always lending himself to the white man's 
immorality, paving the way for his own de- 
struction, so mean that the proverb, "No 
good Indian but a dead one," is current. But 
then, of course, it is right (?) ; for it is civili- 
zation ennobling the untutored mind of the 
savage. 

Take the black man at the South before the 
war. The Southern whites founded the most 
interesting aristocracy the world then knew ; 
they hunted and fought, lived in elegant 
homes with all the appointments of civiliza- 



^e 3s Xisen. 287 

tion ; they were educated and had coura- 
geous, enterprising, and in many respects 
noble natures. Now the black man came in 
contact with this superior civilization two 
centuries and a half before. As the result, 
what was he ? Well, to the extent of one 
million souls he was white. The disowned 
offspring of his masters, born in sin, with the 
seal of his shame set on his forehead as a 
mark of Cain, forever to appeal for justice and 
consideration to the people of this land. He 
had almost no knowledge of right and wrong ; 
small morals, boundless emotionalism. He 
was a thief when thieving could be done by a 
sneak ; he was a savage in his ignorance, a 
child in his dependence. Behold the effect 
of two hundred and fifty years' contact with 
civilization. 

But how about the hundreds of thousands 
in the slums of a great city, whose homes are 
the houses of one or two rooms, who daily 
jostle on the streets the better classes of the 
metropolis, who certainly are at hand to the 
elevating influences of civilization ! To say 
they have no religion is no competent answer, 
for how can they hear except they have a 
preacher, and religion is not responsible for 
the man who does not accept it. Christ is 



288 Hem Concepts of £>lb Dogmas. 

the power of God unto salvation to those who 
believe. Why is it the city goes from cor- 
ruption to corruption in private life, and in 
public and political morality, if the elevating 
power of civilization is the only potent and 
all-powerful factor in reformation of life and 
manners ? Why did the ancient civilizations, 
the Assyrio-Persian, the Greek, the Roman, 
fairly rot to pieces in their ages of highest 
splendor, joint by joint, as if they were being 
eaten off by the gangrene of personal corrup- 
tion ? The Ingersol party then had its inn- 
ings ; shall it have them again ? 

But to go back again to our early experi- 
ence. The budding soul awakened to a 
knowledge of itself finds an environment 
which leads to a special intellectual, moral, 
and spiritual endowment. We call it Chris- 
tianity, or the Christian religion. I dub it 
the influence of Christ on hearts that love 
him ; I believe it to be the one all-powerful 
leverage for making men better, whether 
savage or civilized ; I believe that civilization 
without it is only manners and of doubtful 
utility. If man is to live like a beast, let him 
live in a wigwam ; it is his proper habitation ; 
it is where he first laired, and is his native 
heath. To put a low, immoral drunkard into 



§e 3s Xtsen. 289 

a fine house is indeed putting a beast in the 
parlor. 

Christian manhood and womanhood, then, 
deserve the best things, for they make civ- 
ilization wherever it differs from a society 
formed on natural principles. It ennobles, 
beautifies, saves this life. Hence it is that 
unfolding to the eye of faith the life immortal, 
and preparing a soul for death, notwithstand- 
ing all makes the soul cling to this life, be- 
cause Christianity alone makes this life worth 
living. To work out such an anomaly is 
necessary in order to have the terms of true 
religion fulfilled. It must point to heaven, it 
must ennoble earth ; it must lead the soul to 
Elysium, it must make Elysium in the heart ; 
it must make it gain to die ; it must make it 
glorious to live ; it must make us dream of 
the life to come with the glorified saints, and 
make us pant for battle as good soldiers of 
Jesus Christ. It is as though Christ took us 
by the hand and walked the way. All uplift- 
ing of human life in its motives conies from 
Christ. We learn to sympathize with His 
Spirit ; we learn to make His love our love ; 
we live His spirit and motive into our life so 
far as we can. He touches us through others 
who love and imitate Him ; He touches us 
19 



290 Hem Concepts of £)15 Dogmas, 

through the habits and usages of the com- 
munity in so far as it is moulded by the mind 
of Christ ; He touches us through history; 
He touches us through tales of heroism ; He 
touches us through art. Put above your 
mantel some glorious photograph of the Ma- 
donna, or some great picture of the Man of 
Sorrows himself, as the unique story of His life 
impressed the imagination of a genius ; for to 
think of Him seriously once a year is worth 
the whole cost. 

So we are led to passion-week. We stand 
with the spectators in the gloom of the 
cloud overshadowing the cross, in the gloom 
•of that cloud witnessed afar off in Egypt. 
We see Him laid in Joseph of Arima- 
"thea's new tomb. Thus far what is the key 
to the whole career ? There is no clue ; the 
wonder of the life is supernatural, as by mira- 
cle, but its true nature does not come with 
convicting force. With the resurrection from 
the dead added, all things are complete. We 
see that God was behind Him, that the God- 
head was in Him. We understand the uni- 
queness of His morality because it was God's ; 
we understand the absoluteness of His teach- 
ing of truth because it was God's truth. You 
know where we started with a few luminous 



§e 3s Hisen, 291 



points on the photosphere of the unknown ; 
the light has grown, until at length, fully orbed, 
manhood stands on the confines of eternity 
with the Crucified ; he has drunk in his meas- 
ure of the fullness of love ; his common life 
has been ennobled ; from beast-hood he has 
come to manhood ; he has apprehended some- 
what of the divine nature of justice; he has 
come to see that it is past relations, that jus- 
tice is immutable ; being just, he knows what 
it is to be generous ; through good will to 
others, born of love for them, he comes to be 
merciful ; and when Jesus passed through the 
gates of death, and opened up assurance to 
humanity of the immorality He had pledged 
to man, this reflex influence upon a man's 
heart, if he has grown in any measure into 
His likeness, is like a flood tide under a con- 
vulsion of nature. Before him stretches the 
horizon of eternities, even the horizon of 
Jesus ; his approaching death loses half its 
terrors through the approaching immortali- 
ties. Within, he is conscious of a soul growth 
gained through Jesus of Nazareth. He finds 
that Christ has led him to God, that Christ 
has been the revelator of God, and so full and 
complete a revelator that he can say Christ is 
God. He is conscious that ennoblement and 



292 Hem Concepts of £)16 Dogmas, 

enlargement of his powers is of, through, and 
by God. And he rejoices this Easter day in 
the resurrection from the dead as the key- 
stone of the arch, without which the charac- 
ter of Christ must fall a ruin, and without 
which he would be unable to turn his face to 
the stars in hope. 



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OF 

Synonyms and Antonyms, or, Synonyms and 
Words of Opposite Meaning, 
With an Appendix 
Embracing a Dictionary of Briticisms, Americanisms, Collo- 
quial Phrases, etc., in current use; the Grammatical uses 
of Prepositions and Prepositions Discriminated, a 
list of Homonyms and Homophonous W ords ; 
a collection of Foreign Phrases, and 
a complete list of Abbreviations 
and Contractions used in 
writing- and printing. 

BY 

Rt. Rev. SAMUEL FALLOWS, A.M., D. D. 
One Vol. 5 1 2 Pages, Cloth. Price, $ 1 .00. 

Cloth, Gilt, Beveled Board, Canary Edge. Price, $1.50. 

Daily American, Nashville, Tenn. 

" A book that may be called well nigh invaluable to every 
class of people — students, literary men, public speakers, or any 
Who have much of writing to do. Scarcely any one can afford 
to do without it, and to the person who writes in a hurry it 
will prove a boon indeed." 
Col. Francis W. Parker, Principal Cook County Normal School. 

' ■ A very valuable book to have at ones elbow for constant 
use." 

Thos. B. Stockwell, State Commissioner Public Schools, 
Providence, Rhode Island. 
" Of real value and helpful in many ways, and will commend 
itself to every student." 



CHICACO. 



Fleming H. Revell Company. 



NEW YORK. 



SUGGESTIVE BOOKS 

FOR BIBLE READERS. 



THE OPEN SECRET; or, the Bible Explaining 
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That the author of this work has a faculty of presenting 
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and such will not be disappointed in expecting to find in 
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God's Word, in its application to the practical and daily du- 
ties of Christian living. i2mo, 320 pages, cloth, $1.00. 

BIBLE BRIEFS ; or, Outline Themes for Scrip- 
ture Students. By G. C. and E. A. Needham. i6mo, 
224 pages, cloth, $1.00. 

•' Here are sermons in miniature, which any preacher will find it 

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nes are here ; not artificial 4 sketches,' but Scripture frame-works. 
Oh, that the preachers would depend on such frame-works, rather than 
on such Jire-works as many of them attempt I" — Rev. A.J, Gordon^ 
D. D. y in The Watchword. 

" Here you have meat without bones, and land without stones. Mr. 
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BIBLE HELPS FOR BUSY MEN. By A. C. P. 

COOTE. 

Contains over 200 Scripture subjects, clearly worked out 

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Popular Missionary Biographies 

12mo, 160 pages. Fully illustrated. Cloth extra, 75 cents each. 




From The Missionary 
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11 These are not pans of milk, but little pitchers of cream, compact and 
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SAMUEL CBOWTHEB, the Slave Boy who became 

JBishop of the Niger, By Jesse Page, author of ** Bishop 
Patteson." 
THOMAS J. COMBEB, Missionary Pioneer to the 
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BISHOP PATTESON, the Martyr of Melanesia, By 

Jesse Page. 
OBIFFITH JOHN, Founder of the Hankow Mission, 

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BOBEBT MOBBISON, the Pioneer of Chinese Mis* 

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WILLI AM C ABET, the Shoemaker who became a Mis- 
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JAMES CHALMEBS, Missionary and Explorer of 

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MISSIONABT LADIES IN FOBEIGN LANDS. By 

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JAMES CALVEBT; or, From Dark to Dawn in Fiji. 
JOHN WILLIAMS, the Martyr of Polynesia, By Rev. 

James J. Ellis. 
HENBT MABTTN, His Life and Labors. By Jbssb 

Page, author of " Bishop Patterson," etc. 
DAVID BBAINEBD : Apostle to American Indians, 
MADAGASCAB : Its Missionaries and Martyrs. 
DAVID LIVINGSTONE ; By Arthur Monteflore, F. R. G.S. 



important flfetesionarig Sssues. 

Published by the Fleming H. Revell Company. 



Henry Marty n, Saint and Scholar, First Modern 

Missionary to the Mohammedans. 1781-1812. By George 
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what was special to his character and his work still rises to 
heights which pierce the heavens."— Christian World. 

James Gilmour, of Mongolia. His Diaries, Letters, 

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With three Portraits, two Maps and other Illustrations. 
Large Crown 8vo. cloth 1.75 

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The Ainu of Japan. The Religions, Superstition* 

and the General History of the Hairy Aborigines of Japan. 

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80 Illustrations. 12mo. cloth 1.50 

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A Winter in North China. By Rev. T. M. Morris 

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"A vein of cheerful humor running through the work makes 
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The Child of the Ganges. A tale of the Judson 

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The Holy Spirit in rtissions. By Rev. A. J. Gordon, 

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The Story of Uganda and the Victoria Nyanza 

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12mo„ cloth 1.25 

"Do Not Say;" or, The Church's Excuse for Neg- 
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note by Dr. A. T. Pier&on. 12mo., 2 vols net, 2.00 

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Medical Missions. Their Place and Power. By 

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"An earnebt, intelligent and mighty plea."— Public Opinion. 

"Dr. Lowe writes with enthusiasm yet with calmness; he is 
an authority on the subject."— Missionary Herald. 



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